Spirit Survives a Life-Changing Flash of Fire

ENID, Okla. -- His hands felt like they were in an oven. He didn’t feel much else, though his body was charred from his forehead to his knees. The flash roiled from an oil tank, spewing a ball of savage fire that swallowed Greg Walton and three other field hands, then recoiled into the tank as fast as it attacked.

He saw nothing but yellow.

The cotton T-shirt disintegrated off his back as the explosive fumes sent him running. He rolled instinctively, then took off his smoldering jeans and stood in his underwear as the four waited for an ambulance to reach the remote southern Oklahoma oil field outside Healdton.

His worn leather gloves and sturdy work boots protected his hands and feet, but most of his body, including his face, was burned so deep that the scars would never heal.

It was July 26, 1983, his 21st birthday. Until then, Walton was an outgoing and athletic college junior with smiling blue eyes and a mop of brown hair. He was rush chairman for Delta Tau Delta, dating a stunning blonde and studying to become a doctor.

It all changed in a flash of fire.

Walton was moaning when Healdton rescuers doused him with saline and covered him with a sterile sheet. Pieces of skin were hanging off his body.

His parents got the call from Getty Trading & Transportation Co. while they were canning pickles. When they met him at the burn center in Oklahoma City, Walton’s head was swollen as big as a basketball. He showed his mother his hands -- not black like the rest of him.

Doctors, worried about organ failure and infection, gave him a 3% chance of surviving the burns that covered 75% of his body.

“Don’t give up on him,” his mother, Beverly, kept telling them. “He’s got a lot of fight.”

Walton asked first for his girlfriend. She quit summer school and flew in from Kentucky. For 55 days, she and his parents took turns at his bedside, coaxing him to eat, telling him that he needed the calories to grow skin.

The pain was excruciating as doctors peeled off layers of burned flesh. They used pig skin and skin from Walton’s torso and legs, where second-degree burns left blisters, to replace skin that had third-degree burns.

Dr. Paul Silverstein rebuilt Walton’s eyelids, nostrils and lips. He grafted his hands, cheeks and chin, and took hair from Walton’s head to make him eyebrows. In all, there were more than 25 surgeries.

“In 1983, the statistics say he should have died,” Silverstein said. “But he was a fighter.”

Walton had the hardest time on the 21st and 22nd days after the explosion with the deaths of Junior McDaniel and Mike Harmon, who were leaning over a manhole on the tank when the fumes ignited. Walton was burned almost as badly as they were.

“I remember him asking me if that’s what would happen to him,” his mother said.

The fourth student on the crew, Jon Cline, was burned on 40% of his body. Cline, who became an accountant, sat in a pickup with the air conditioner cranked high to soothe his skin as he waited for the ambulance.

Cline reached an out-of-court settlement with Black & Decker Inc., which made the electric wrench that he and Walton said sparked the fire. Walton won $10 million after a 1989 civil trial.

*

Walton’s parents took him home in September, nearly two months after the accident, not realizing that the hardest part was yet to come.

On Halloween, he answered the door and a friend of his little sister joked that he didn’t need to wear a mask anymore. He grabbed his car keys and went for a drive, alone.

People who knew Walton all his life didn’t recognize him, and guests at his parents’ home fell over furniture when he walked into the room.

“He just looked awful,” Beverly Walton said. “He had a lot of guts. I would have still been hiding in a closet somewhere.”

In those first few months at home, Walton had to sleep with his arms splinted and outstretched and his fingers spread apart so that his skin wouldn’t stick together. He had to be lathered with lotion twice a day and wear an outfit as tight as a girdle that hinders scar tissue.

Scars constricted his mouth so much that it took 20 minutes to fit a spoon inside.

Walton’s girlfriend didn’t go back to Oklahoma State that fall. She stayed by his side until he pushed her away.

“He didn’t understand why I stayed with him or why anyone would stay with him, and it got harder and harder for me, for him to be yelling at me not to stay,” she testified at his civil trial. It was six years later and she was married to one of his fraternity brothers.

Walton got the courage to return to college a year after the explosion. He took a few easy classes, wanting to see if he could fit in socially. He still had dozens of friends, and almost everyone on campus knew who he was. His friends say he never let his relationships get too serious.

“Greg is probably one of the most outgoing guys you’ll ever know,” said Dr. Brian Whitson, a friend from medical school. “But in some regards, he’s quiet. He holds a lot in. I don’t think he likes to burden other people with any troubles he has.”

Walton talked some about the girlfriend that he lost and confided in Whitson that he thought that he would never marry or have children.

He poured all his efforts into becoming a surgeon.

It seemed like fate. His sight wasn’t affected, despite having his eyelids scorched. Only the tops of his hands -- not the palms or fingers -- were burned.

“He’s never been one to sit around and feel sorry for himself,” his mother said. “He doesn’t have much tolerance for people who do.”

*

Walton, now 40, works as a general surgeon for Integris Baptist, the hospital system that saved his life. He says his scars make him a better doctor: “I’m more compassionate from being on the other side. When I tell my patients I know what they’re going through, I do.”

While performing a recent gastric bypass surgery, he sang along with the Beatles and Bruce Springsteen. His gloved hands, each gripping a silver tool, swiveled in different directions as they probed through holes in his patient’s abdomen. “Sweet!” he said when the laparoscopic camera was at just the right angle.

In Enid, he’s known as a big-hearted doctor whose sense of humor puts people at ease with his appearance. Some nurses call him Tigger, after Winnie the Pooh’s cheerful sidekick.

Walton considered working with burn patients. In medical school at the University of Oklahoma, he did a rotation at Integris’ burn center in Oklahoma City and later spent a year treating burn patients at Brooke Army Hospital in San Antonio.

But he couldn’t take the heat. He can’t sweat because of his scars, and burn center rooms are kept warm because the patients evaporate so much body heat.

Still, Walton calls his decision to work at Brooke serendipity.

That’s where he caught up with Traci Melton, the sister-in-law of a friend from medical school. He’d met her years earlier, before she married someone else, had a child and divorced.

“He came over and I wouldn’t let him go,” she said. “I was smitten pretty quickly.”

They married eight years ago.

“I’m lucky,” Traci Walton said, giggling. “At times, it just doesn’t seem real.”

In eight years, her husband has complained only once about the way he looks -- a mutter as they dressed for a formal party. Mostly, she says, he acts like a “cornball.”

“He definitely doesn’t sweat the small stuff,” she said. “He has a love of life.”

People who knew Walton before the explosion tell her that he looked just like their son, 4-year-old Grant. Traci and Greg also have Haley, 6; Grant’s twin sister, Allison, and Brittney, 13, from Traci’s first marriage.

It’s a long way from when Walton thought that he’d never find someone to love.