Roger Dwayne Denney (49) of Somerset, KY is a family man through and through. Since his injuries he has spent most of his days healing and recovering, while finding time to care for his wife, Kristen and son, Elijah (12).
Before his incident, Dwayne was employed at Tri City Motors in Somerset, an auto body shop where most recently he has been doing paint work. When he isn’t working, he enjoys watching and coaching basketball with his son. “I love watching him play. I was also into drag racing, show cars, muscle cars…basketball and cars are things I’ve been around my whole life.” He also exercises regularly, something he partially attributes his recovery to. “I’ve always done pushups, sit-ups, and bodywork with my job. I was always active every single day.”
Dwayne is also a huge Kentucky Basketball fan; the recent announcement of a new head basketball coach for the program has him excited for the first time in a while. “I love it. I think it’s going to be a wonderful change. I’ve been around it my whole life, and after the last four or five years of disappointment, I’m excited again.”
On the evening of November 18, 2022 around 6:30 p.m., an incident at his home would change Dwayne’s life forever. “I was in the kitchen getting ready to fix something to eat with my wife outside. She was by our pool, and I have a little fire pit we like to sit by. She was trying to start a fire with some leftover cardboard, but it had just rained, and the wet cardboard couldn’t stay lit. I knew I had a little bit of gas in a jug, so I went to pour some on to try and get the fire going. Come to think of it, I’d never poured gas on a fire before. I went to pour the jug over, and as soon as I did, the flames shot straight up into the jug and it blew straight up into my face, got all over my clothes…it was like a bomb going off, right in my face. My whole neighborhood heard it, and said it sounded just like a bomb. I shut my eyes as tight as I could and turned my head, but I felt heat. I tell people, for two seconds my life flashed before my eyes and I thought I was dead. I thought I was done. The heat…it was insane. Then I had a picture in my head of my son, and my wife, and felt immediately that I couldn’t die.”
“I stripped my clothes off because I could tell I was completely engulfed. I kept trying to find water; our pool already had a cover on it or I would’ve jumped into that. Then I started running to our water hose out front, when my wife ran out and tackled me, and started putting me out. I was pulling my pants down as I was running, trying to strip everything off. Everything was on fire. I was wearing Under Armor clothing, which I now know is highly flammable. If she hadn’t tackled me and put me out, I don’t know what would’ve happened.”
“I get into the house, just thinking I need cold water immediately. I jumped in the shower, didn’t know what I looked like, just wanting to let cold water run over me. As I put my hands against the shower, I opened up my eyes, and I could see skin hanging from my arms; it looked about a foot long, hanging off of me. I knew I was a mess then. My wife and little boy come in, and they’re both hollering, and I’m trying to keep them calm; as a father, you’re only thinking that you’ve got this, you have to be tough…the adrenaline was pumping so hard, I didn’t really feel pain, just pressure.”
Kristen threw some clothing on Dwayne and rushed him to a hospital, “...faster than an ambulance could’ve.” Initially, they were informed they would have to wait to be seen, but once the medical staff saw the extent of Dwayne’s burns as he took his hoodie off, he was immediately rushed in to receive care.
“Sitting in the wheelchair, I could hear people saying ‘this is bad, I’m going to have to intubate him.’ A good friend of mine had heard about the whole thing, and somehow he was there when I opened my eyes. He’s like a second father to me, his name is Carson Atwood. I told Carson that I didn’t know if I was going to make it, and I asked him to take care of my wife and my kid. Then I woke up 14 days later in Louisville. When I woke up, I had a bad case of ICU delirium, and pretty rough pain for a few days, tied to the bed because I kept trying to fight. When the last thing you remember is being on fire, and blown up, then you wake up surrounded by people in a hospital bed in Louisville? That’s…something.”
Dwayne had several debridement procedures as well as skin grafts. “I can’t explain the pain. They had me on medicine, but there’s no explaining to people what burn pain is like. Both legs, my right arm, both hands…they thought I was going to lose my right hand. My whole right side of my abdomen, belly, my back and sides…I was burned everywhere. But my wife stayed with me, she never left. My mom and dad, Diane and Roger came in from Florida. They never left, they stayed like a month to watch my son because my wife wouldn’t leave my side. Looking back, God had to be protecting me, pushing my head away. It burned the hat off my head, there was nothing left but part of the bill of my hat. It got me, but a lot of it healed.”
Dwayne was transported to UofL Health for care. The time in the hospital after Dwayne woke up was difficult. “When I woke up, they had to change my bandages twice a day, and that was the worst experience ever. But the girls up there…they were so good at what they did. The situation is horrible, they’d have to wrap adaptives around you before putting bandages on. If they aren’t easy when they’re taking those off it would hurt so bad, but they did it so gently and easily with some water. It was miserable, but they made it the best they possibly could with the situation. They’d put on music, and sing and laugh with me…they were unbelievable, that whole team was. I told you, I’m a Kentucky fan, but I will pull for Louisville now, because Louisville saved my life. Louisville was awesome to me. I still have laser therapy once a month, and everyone in that burn clinic is so great to me.”
“When I went through ICU delirium, that was awful. I didn’t go to sleep for 48 hours, 50 hours maybe. It was pretty bad. Being intubated and under medication, there were wild dreams and memories of everything that had happened. It felt like I was in a whole other world, while I was in the coma.”
Dwayne notes that while he was in his coma, he was, “...visited by God. There was peace through that whole situation that I tell everybody. I would be sitting there while in a coma, but I remember for day by day God would come to me in different forms. I remember sitting in a swing, and I’d look over at Him and I would know that it was God. He would change to different people, but I knew it was Him. Every time I’d look over at Him…you know how a cat would rub up against you and comfort you? It felt like God doing that to me, comforting me. I knew it was Him. When I woke up and came to in the ICU, I had a love for people…every nurse that came in, I wanted to tell them I loved them, wanted to thank them, hear about their families…I just loved everybody. I was mean when I went through delirium for a few days, but they changed medications and when I came to and was myself again, I had a whole new outlook on life. I just loved everybody, I had no ill will toward nobody or nothing.”
“I was in so much pain, there was nothing anyone could do for me. I couldn’t move, they had to move me over to change bandages…I can’t explain how much it hurt. All I had was God to depend on. I felt like I was crying out to Him, and He would meet me right there. There was a song, the Goodness of God that carried me through this whole thing, and now I can’t hardly listen to it because it takes me right back to that hospital bed. But that song did so much for me over those 30 days. Every time that song comes on now, I cry like a baby. But I’d lay on my shoulder, sit there and pray while that song would play.”
Roger still deals with the trauma of what happened to him in late November, 2022. He still has trouble sleeping, and every time he takes his clothes off he’s reminded of the scars of the event. But his faith carried him through a lot of the hardest parts. “When He would come to me, it was like being in the core of the Earth. But it felt like we were looking at an Alaskan scenery, with the water, mountains, and sky. That’s what we would see when we were on the swing. I would keep telling him, ‘I love you Jesus, I love you, I love you,’ and He’d tell me, ‘Quit saying that, you don’t have to say that, I know that. You make everything so complicated, but it’s so simple, just go to that, be that to everybody else. You tell everyone else that [you love them].’”
“When I woke up, I tried telling everybody this. He told me that, ‘Whenever you see the dew coming off the ground in the morning, that’s me. When you see the sun, beaming through your window, that’s me.’ He’s as real as real can get. Nobody else could do anything for me, but Him. When all you have is yourself and your voice to say, ‘Jesus,’ He’s there.”
Dwayne was in UofL Health for 30 days, before being transferred to Cardinal Hill Rehabilitation shortly before Christmas, 2022. “They helped me to get up and start moving, no matter how much it hurts, they want you moving to keep that skin from getting tight. I thought I was a tough dude but those burns are a different animal. They thought I’d be in Louisville for three or four months, before I left after 30 days. Then they thought I’d be in Cardinal Hill for a month or two, and I left Cardinal Hill on Christmas Eve, 2022; there was a snowstorm coming, and they told my wife that if she was going to come get me, she’d better do it now. That was a miracle. It was almost overwhelming, I was excited but I was also nervous because I knew how bad my injuries were. But my wife said she could handle it, and she did.”
“They taught my wife how to dress my wounds, and she dressed me for two months, maybe three months, doing it the same way as the girls in Louisville. She was my nurse at home for two months, an hour and a half, two hours every single night to change the dressings. She took care of me as well as the nurses did.” Dwayne spent quite a bit of time alone, recovering. He notes that the isolation felt a little similar to COVID, but it was even more intense. He also lost quite a bit throughout the process. “I was 210-215 pounds when this all happened, but when they took me to Cardinal Hill and they weighed me on the bed I was 159 pounds.” Dwayne would eventually gain some of the weight back as he recovered.
“My wife was like an angel though. God anointed her hands, because I never caught anything or had any issues whatsoever. She did everything perfectly…she was a full-time nurse for that stretch.”
In the time from December 2022 through 2023, much of Dwayne’s time has been dominated by recovery and PT, in addition to monthly laser treatments in Louisville. “Everybody there treats me so well. I’ve never talked to a single person who was a smart aleck to me, or in a bad mood…I don’t have a single complaint about any of the care that I received.” While recovery remains on the horizon for Dwayne, he does have plans to travel to Anna Maria Island, FL in June. “It’ll be my first vacation since this. I’ve always loved the ocean. It’ll be a little tricky now, with the sun and how thin my skin is, but we’ll figure it out.” He also has plans to continue fixing up an old car with his son, something the two were doing prior to his burn. Going to his son’s games also helps to get Dwayne out of the house and back in the community, which was initially intimidating after being so isolated for so long. “I’d act better than I was, walk straighter and act like I’m alright, because I didn’t want to seem weak to anyone. But getting back out there with him, watching him play and talking with people, it was good. My face had mostly healed and if I was wearing sleeves it was hard to tell anything had happened.” Dwayne’s story was also recently featured in a Spectrum News 1 highlight.
“If I could go to the Burn Unit, talk to some people up there, give them any kind of hope…I can’t explain it, how bad the pain is. It’s so severe, that you almost quit hurting, you get to a point where it’s just constant. And when you’re laying there, your mind is running 1,000 miles an hour. Wondering what you look like, how you’re going to be able to move, if it’s going to heal, what it’s going to look like…people need to be encouraged that they will get through it, and they need to keep fighting. You have to put in the work, but you will get through it.”
“I’d tell others to fight, don’t give up. And know that this is hard on family too; they love you to death, but with burn patients, the healing takes so long and it’s so slow. You want people to know what you’re going through, but you also don’t want them to know. Your family wants you to heal quicker, and you do what you can to heal from something that hard. But it will all work out. Put God first, He got me through all of it. My faith, my love for my wife and my son, and everybody around me, friends and family, my support system was awesome. My group really stayed engaged with me, calling or coming by. But fight, and advocate for your health.”
Roger Dwayne Denney.
Relentless, Never Give Up.
Trauma Survivor.
