Triplets scarred by fire are healed by love

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The last roll
Nov. 27: Parsons, Kansas, is place that still processes Kodachrome color film, but Kodak has stopped making it, leaving this little town pondering a big question. NBC’s Bob Dotson reports.

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‘A fresh slate’
When the girls were 16, they got the news they’d dreaded. They came home one day to find their aunt Vicki surrounded by many of their father’s friends. “We knew something was wrong,” says Jordan. “We knew it was about our dad, because he wasn’t there.” Their aunt broke the news: their father had died from an overdose of pills.

The girls grieved. But they also felt they’d been given, as Jordan says, “a fresh slate.” For the first time, they started to heal.

Now students in San Antonio — Jordan and Trae are studying occupational therapy at the University of Texas, and Chandra, who hopes to start a nonprofit to help burn victims, will transfer there in the fall — the triplets are beginning to open new doors. Chandra, who in her early teens used to weep to her grandmother that she’d never have a boyfriend, had her first serious relationship. After a month of dating, she was ready to show him the extensive scars on her back. “Afterward, he told me he only cared for me more,” says Chandra. “I can be very private, and I think it made him feel closer to me, that I let him see that.”

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The girls also began to feel closer to their mother. Looking through their grandmother’s photographs, they found a letter from their mom to their grandparents. Seeing her handwriting for the first time somehow made her feel real, made her someone they might have known and loved. “Her letter seemed really carefree and loving,” says Jordan. The sisters had always been struck by how much they looked like their mother; now Jordan noticed the similarities in their curly handwriting. “I felt like I finally had a piece of her,” says Trae. “I understood a part of who she was.”

Not long after that, the girls started asking their grandmother about what happened the night of the fire. “For my whole life, I just brushed off what had happened in our past,” says Trae. “But once I saw my mother’s letter, I wanted to know more about what happened to her and the mystery behind that night. So we started asking questions. We heard contradicting things, and it was scary to hear what was said, but I didn’t want it to stop.” They have confronted the possibility that their father might have been responsible for their mother’s death and their injuries, a scenario they’d rarely contemplated before. “I haven’t come to any one conclusion,” says Jordan. “But we’ve been forced to ask questions and try to find our own answers. We might not all have the same answers. And there have been days when we’ve all cried together and talked about the fire. It’s been painful.” Whatever happened, she says, they still love their father.

The Lumenis laser
Burns are particularly intractable scars, and doctors have struggled with the limited treatments available to minimize their visibility. Some therapies, like silicone sheeting and cortisone shots, are aimed at flattening the scar and evening out the collagen; “pulsed dye lasers” may also lighten the red coloring of scars, says Anjali Dahiya, M.D., an assistant professor in dermatology at the NewYork Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center.
The Lumenis laser, which Dr. Jill Waibel used on Chandra, Jordan and Trae, is a relatively new treatment option, and works by creating millions of microscopic tunnels in the scarred area to stimulate deep collagen growth and tighten the skin in the hope of more dramatic healing. “It was a little painful on my face, and afterward it looked like a really bad sunburn,” says Jordan. “Now the scars are smoother, and we hope we’ll see more results in time.”
Pat Wexler, M.D., a top cosmetic dermatologist in New York, says the treatment could be a real breakthrough: “It allows you to do deeper resurfacing, and it targets not just texture, but pigmentation as well, in one treatment, all with easier recovery and fewer complications.” As Dr. Waibel points out, “There are thousands of third-degree-burn patients every year. Hopefully, with this treatment, we can help more of them.”
“We’re old enough now to be able to see the different shades of gray, how complicated things can be,” she says. “People go through horrible times.”

New treatment
This past summer, the three sisters took another step in their healing process. Chandra had stumbled on a Web video of a doctor who had used new laser treatments to dramatically improve the facial scarring of a woman who’d been burned in a grease fire. She shared the video with her sisters, and, in the middle of the night, Trae left a message for the doctor asking for help. A few weeks later, the girls drove, along with their grandmother, for two days straight, to make their appointment in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Video
Web only: Dr. Waibel explains the procedure
May 28: Dr. Jill Waibel demonstrates how the ablative fractional laser can treat burn scars.
Today show
It came as some surprise to dermatologist Jill Waibel, M.D., that the appointment turned out to be for three identical triplets, not just the young woman who’d left the message. She started by asking how they got their burn scars. “And then all three of them started telling their story — we were all crying,” she recalls. “You couldn’t not cry. With burn patients, every day they look in the mirror, they think of that fire. It’s a daily reminder. People aren’t always kind, and the survivors have to explain over and over in their life where that burn came from. It’s an extra burden for them to carry around.”

February 28, the day of the treatment, was intense, and the girls’ emotions were close to the surface. Chandra had undergone dermabrasion two years earlier, which had been painful and had yielded little result. And though this laser treatment promised to possibly lessen their scarring by 80 percent, they would have to wait up to three months to see how much it really helped; Dr. Waibel also warned them they’d probably have to have the procedure several times.

As they had so many other times in their lives, the girls got each other through the day: They laughed at one another’s jokes, they held Chandra’s hands when she cried, they were in and out of the three treatment rooms checking up on one another constantly. Because they were undergoing, once again, the same experience, each one knew how her sisters felt: nervous, uncomfortable, hopeful, giddy.

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Triplets scarred by fire are healed by love