A four-year-old girl who suffered excruciating burns in a farming accident has to undergo a decade of surgeries to reconfigure her face.
Rawkee Hunt endured third-degree burns when smouldering embers caught in the wind and blew onto her body on her father’s ranch in Kanab, Utah.
The youngster now faces a lengthy round of treatments, including a procedure where medical balloons will be inserted underneath the surface of her skin, to fully recover.
The accident happened in February when Rawkee was playing on the ranch with her dad Shay, 29, who had just finished burning fence lines – a common farming practice to keep fences clear of weeds.
Rawkee was airlifted to a hospital in Las Vegas before she was flown to the University of Utah hospital, where she underwent multiple surgeries including a skin graft.
Doctors took skin from her right rib cage and the front of both of her thighs to cover the burns on her face, hands, legs, left arm, and left rib cage.
After 45 days in the ICU, Rawkee returned home but her body is still traumatised from the event.
Rawkee’s mum Megan, 28, a hair salon owner, said that her daughter’s upbeat attitude despite her devastating injuries has inspired the family to stay positive.
‘She sits in front of the mirror every morning and she never feels bad about herself,’ Megan said.
‘She never feels ugly.’
Megan adds that Rawkee was never actually on fire, instead, it was the intense heat from the freshly burned embers that had caused the injury.
‘Shay heard her screaming. He couldn’t see anything,’ Megan explained.
‘He started pulling her clothes off and he saw her sweater melting into her skin and her face was melting.’
Little Rawkee will be in and out of hospital for the next ten years undergoing multiple surgeries to heal her burns and reconstruct her face.
At the moment Rawkee is not stable enough for surgery as her endocrine system has collapsed, causing her body to swell up.
The reconstruction phase – which will take three to five years – will continue when she is stable again.
After that, the same procedure will begin on the rest of her body.
Megan added: ‘Then she will have cosmetic surgeries over the years to replace the things that will have been lost.
‘She will lose two thirds of her hair as we stretched her scalp.
‘She will have to have hair plug surgery and her eyebrows will have to be restored.
‘Her lips and nose will have to be injected with fat to get them back to normal.’
Megan and Shay, who are also parents to two other kids and are pregnant with a fourth, have set up a GoFundMe to cover the staggering medical bills.
Megan said: ‘I think we broke the million-dollar mark just that first week in the Vegas hospital.
‘We’ve got ten years ahead of us of medical bills.
‘Thankfully we both work and we are financially stable but we would like to raise money to put in a savings account for Rawkee.
‘I don’t want this to be a burden for her.’
If you would like to donate to Rawkee’s fundraiser you can visit her GoFundMe page.
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