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 As the first blog entry got exhausted. My second book |
| Evolution of Love Part 2 |
| She had days to save 28 people whose skin had been burned off their bodies—so she sprayed new skin directly onto their wounds. October 12, 2002. Bali, Indonesia. It was supposed to be a perfect Saturday night. Tourists filled the bars and clubs of Kuta, a vibrant district popular with young travelers. Music pulsed through crowded venues. People laughed, danced, celebrated being alive. At 11:08 PM, a suicide bomber detonated a backpack bomb inside Paddy's Pub. Fifteen seconds later, a massive car bomb exploded across the street at the Sari Club. The second explosion was enormous—equivalent to over a ton of TNT. The blast incinerated everyone in the immediate vicinity. It shattered windows blocks away. The fireball was visible for miles. When the smoke cleared, 202 people were dead. Hundreds more were catastrophically injured. Many of the survivors had been standing close enough to the blast to be engulfed in flames, but far enough away to survive. Their clothes had melted into their skin. Their flesh was charred. Some had burns covering 40%, 50%, even 60% of their bodies. Third-degree burns. The kind where skin is completely destroyed—burned away entirely, exposing raw muscle and tissue beneath. The most critically injured were evacuated to Royal Perth Hospital in Western Australia—28 patients with burns so extensive that survival seemed impossible. That's when plastic surgeon Dr. Fiona Wood received the call. She was about to deploy a medical technique that most doctors thought sounded like science fiction. And she was about to save every single one of those 28 lives. But first, let me tell you how Fiona Wood prepared for a crisis she never wanted to face. Fiona Wood had been working at Royal Perth Hospital's burns unit since the 1990s. She was a skilled plastic surgeon, one of the best in Australia at treating burn victims. And she was deeply frustrated. The standard treatment for severe burns was skin grafting—surgeons would cut away large sheets of healthy skin from unburned parts of the patient's body, then transplant those sheets to cover the burn wounds. The process was medieval in its brutality. Imagine you've just been burned over half your body. You're in excruciating pain. Your skin has been destroyed. And now doctors tell you they need to cut away large sections of your remaining healthy skin, creating entirely new wounds that will also need to heal. Patients with extensive burns often didn't have enough healthy skin left to harvest. The donor sites themselves became new sources of pain and scarring. Recovery took months, sometimes years. And the scarring—both physical and psychological—was often permanent and severe. Fiona looked at this medieval procedure and thought: there has to be a better way. She began collaborating with medical scientist Marie Stoner on a revolutionary idea: what if you didn't need to transplant sheets of skin? What if you could spray skin cells directly onto wounds? It sounded absurd. Spray skin like paint? How could that possibly work? But Fiona and Marie weren't just dreaming—they were engineering. Here's what they developed: Take a tiny biopsy of the patient's healthy skin—about the size of a postage stamp. Instead of cutting away large sheets, you only needed a small sample. Culture those cells in a laboratory for just a few days. Traditional cultured skin grafts took weeks to grow enough tissue. Wood and Stoner's technique was exponentially faster. Suspend the cultured skin cells in a special solution. Then—and this is where it seemed like magic—spray those suspended cells directly onto the burn wound using a device that looked like an airbrush. The sprayed cells would attach to the wound bed. They'd begin multiplying, regenerating, growing into new skin right there on the patient's body. The advantages were extraordinary: Speed: Days instead of weeks to prepare cells for treatment. Less trauma: Only a tiny biopsy needed instead of cutting away large areas of healthy skin. Better coverage: Spraying created more even distribution of cells across irregular wound surfaces. Reduced scarring: The finer, more even application led to dramatically better cosmetic outcomes. Higher survival rates: Faster treatment meant less time for deadly infections to take hold. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, Fiona Wood tested spray-on skin on patients with smaller burns. It worked beautifully. But nothing—nothing—prepared her for October 2002. When those 28 Bali bombing survivors arrived at Royal Perth Hospital, Fiona Wood confronted injuries that defied conventional treatment. One patient had burns covering 92% of his body. Others were close behind. Their skin had been literally burned off by a fireball that reached temperatures exceeding 1000 degrees Celsius. With traditional skin grafting, these patients were dead. Simple mathematics: you can't harvest enough healthy skin from 10% of someone's body to cover 90% of their burned surface. And even if you could somehow manage it, growing enough cultured skin using traditional methods would take three, four, maybe six weeks. These patients didn't have weeks. They had days—maybe—before infection and organ failure would kill them. Fiona Wood looked at 28 people who were dying in front of her, and she made a decision. She would deploy spray-on skin at a scale never attempted before. Her team moved with controlled urgency. They took small biopsies from each patient's tiny patches of surviving healthy skin. While those samples went to the lab for rapid cell culturing, the medical team fought desperately to keep the patients alive. Imagine the scene: burn victims in medically induced comas, their bodies wrapped in specialized dressings, connected to dozens of monitors and IVs. Doctors and nurses working around the clock, fighting infections, managing pain, preventing organ systems from shutting down. Every hour mattered. Every delay meant higher risk of death. In the lab, Marie Stoner and her team cultured the skin cells with extraordinary speed. Days instead of weeks. They suspended the cultured cells in solution, loaded them into the spray devices. Then came the moment that would change burn treatment forever. Fiona Wood stood over patients whose bodies were more burn wound than skin, and she began spraying cultured cells directly onto their injuries. It looked impossible. It looked like she was spray-painting skin onto people. But the cells attached. They began growing. New skin started regenerating across wounds that conventional medicine had no way to treat. Over the following days and weeks, Fiona Wood and her team performed this miracle 28 times. Small biopsies. Rapid cell culture. Spray application. Watch the skin regenerate. And one by one, against all odds, the patients began to heal. Their bodies started to recover. Wounds that should have been fatal began closing with new skin. Infection rates were lower than anyone expected. Healing happened faster than traditional grafting could achieve. Of the 28 critically burned Bali bombing survivors evacuated to Royal Perth Hospital—people who should have died—all 28 survived. Every single one. The world suddenly wanted to know: what did this Australian surgeon do? How did she save people who shouldn't have been savable? Spray-on skin became international news. The technique that had seemed too futuristic, too good to be true, had just proven itself under the most extreme conditions imaginable. But for Fiona Wood, the attention wasn't the point. The patients were the point. She'd spent years developing spray-on skin because she couldn't stand watching burn victims suffer through the brutality of conventional treatment. She couldn't accept that children who'd been burned in accidents had to spend months in hospitals undergoing surgery after surgery, emerging with severe scarring that would mark them for life. She knew there had to be a better way. So she found it. The Bali bombing survivors didn't just survive—many of them healed with dramatically better outcomes than traditional grafting would have provided. Less scarring. Faster recovery. Less pain throughout the process. They got their lives back. Some returned to work, to families, to normal activities. They didn't have to spend months or years recovering from secondary surgeries. They weren't defined forever by their scars. In 2002, Fiona Wood was named a National Living Treasure by Australia. In 2005, she received Australian of the Year—one of the nation's highest honors. But awards weren't why she did this work. Today, spray-on skin is used in burn units around the world. The technique that seemed impossible in the 1990s—spray skin cells onto a wound and watch new skin grow—is now standard practice for treating severe burns. Children who suffer burns in accidents can be treated faster, with less pain, and better cosmetic outcomes. Military personnel injured by explosive burns receive spray-on skin treatment. Victims of house fires, industrial accidents, or any other catastrophic burns now have access to treatment that didn't exist 25 years ago. How many lives has spray-on skin saved since 2002? Thousands, certainly. Maybe tens of thousands. How many children have been spared months of suffering? How many people have healed with minimal scarring instead of permanent disfigurement? How many families haven't been torn apart by endless hospitalizations? We'll never know the exact numbers. But we know this: 28 people survived the Bali bombings because Fiona Wood spent years preparing for a crisis she hoped would never come. Because she refused to accept that burn victims had to suffer through medieval treatment methods. Because she looked at the limitations of medicine and said: not good enough. And then she built something better. Think about the audacity of spray-on skin as a concept. You're going to spray cells onto someone and expect them to grow into functional skin? It sounds like something from a science fiction novel. But Fiona Wood turned science fiction into standard medical practice. That's what real innovation looks like—not just having a wild idea, but doing the years of painstaking research, the countless experiments, the incremental improvements that turn "impossible" into "routine." Fiona Wood could have been satisfied with being an excellent burn surgeon using conventional techniques. She could have accepted the limitations of traditional skin grafting. Instead, she revolutionized burn treatment. And when 28 people arrived at her hospital with injuries that should have been fatal, she was ready. That's the lesson in Fiona Wood's story: preparation meets opportunity in the most unexpected ways. You do the work, you develop the skills, you perfect the technique—not knowing if or when you'll need it. And then one terrible night in Bali, bombs explode. And suddenly everything you've built, everything you've prepared, becomes the difference between life and death for 28 people. Fiona Wood had days to save 28 burn victims whose bodies were more wound than skin. She sprayed new skin onto them. They all survived. And burn treatment was never the same again. Dr. Fiona Wood didn't just save 28 lives that day. She changed what's possible for every burn victim who came after. She proved that innovation can defeat injuries that once meant certain death or permanent disability. She showed the world that with enough determination, creativity, and refusal to accept "impossible," you can transform medicine itself. Twenty-eight people went home to their families because one surgeon wouldn't accept that medieval procedures were the best medicine could offer. How many more will go home because of what she built? |
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