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CHICAGO (CBS) — A child who survived a house fire where his grandmother was killed will be released from the hospital.
Seven-year-old Brayden Findlay was injured when a fire engulfed his home in Chicago’s Clearing neighborhood on November 29. The fire killed his grandmother.
According to the Chicago Fire Department, a fire broke out in the basement of the home at 5724 W. 64 St., near Midway Airport.
The child was brought to the Loyola Medicine Burn Center. According to Loyola, “he had suffered a life-threatening inhalation injury and had third-degree burns to his arms and hands.”
Dr. Joshua Carson, regional director of Loyola Medicine’s Burn Center said his team administered specialized aerosolize treatments.
“We figured out some ways to give them some special treatments to avoid putting a tube in him to breathe for him right away, which was really good for him. It let his airway get some time to sort of calm down a little bit,” Carson said.
The child was on a ventilator for days but is now able to breathe on his own. Carson also treated Brayden with “a revolutionary technique that provides an alternative to traditional large-scale skin grafts.”
“We take the patient’s skin and use a special kit from a company called AVITA that dissolves the skin into individual cells. Then you can mix it into a spray and you spray that skin on top of just little bitty pieces of graft. So rather than have a big slab of his skin scarring up his arms, he’s got little lines of skin graft. And then he’s got this spray so that it can heal more like natural skin,” Carson said.
The child’s grandmother, Susan Collopy, was described as feisty during a video on her 60th birthday. Collopy and her two puppies died in the house fire.
Brayden Findlay, Melissa Compean, was told the fire was most likely caused by a lamp. She first found the flames and rushed to get her 7-year-old son.
“So I started screaming like bloody murder, like ‘Brayden get out! Hurry up! Come on, run run!”
He wasn’t responding — so she broke his bedroom window from outside to pull him out.
“And all I was breathing in was smoke and It was so hot. So unbelievably painful to my throat.”
She grabbed him — feeling his bloody arms. Paramedics rushed them both along with Compean’s stepfather to local hospitals.
“You know Christmas is right around the corner. And I’m going to have to be here with him.”
The mom now asking for anything to make Brayden’s Christmas feel as normal as possible. People have donated to their GoFundMe. Classmates created encouraging videos for him. The support he’ll need when he learns his Grandma is no longer here.
“They’re family now, just because they’ve been there and really care about our well-being. They’re not just doing a job. They’re really looking out for the two of us,” Compean said of the team at Loyola.
Brayden will go to a rehabilitation facility where he’ll work with physical and occupational therapists to rebuild muscle in his arms and hands.
Source: ChicagoCBS
