Burn Survivor Recalls Watching His Face ‘Slide Off’ in Reflection of Dad’s Glasses After Traumatizing Incident at Age 6

Just minutes after his body went up in flames, Terry McCarty began to grasp what had happened to him. Lying on the sidewalk waiting for an ambulance, he started to realize the scale of his injuries — burns that would ultimately cover 73 percent of his skin.

McCarty was 6 years old when his two older brothers decided to experiment with a bowl of kerosene. Curious, they tried to set it alight. When the liquid unexpectedly ignited, one brother panicked and kicked the bowl away — sending the flaming fuel straight into Terry’s chest.

“It wrapped around me like a wet blanket with all the flaming kerosene,” McCarty, now 39, recalls. It took a moment for his mind to catch up with what his body was experiencing. “I thought everything around me was on fire. I didn’t realize I was the one on fire,” he says.

If gasoline is like water, McCarty explains, kerosene is more like a “gelatinous-style fuel.” It clings. “It took a few seconds for the fire to actually burn through the kerosene layer and then get to my skin,” he says. “That’s when the realization really kicked in that something was very wrong.”

The pain and mental “chaos” from those moments are permanently etched in his memory. But only recently did another detail surface for him: the sound. The fire, he says, was “deafening.” He compares it to standing beside a roaring bonfire — except he was in the middle of it.

A neighbor, seeing what was happening, rushed over with a sleeping bag from a recent camping trip. He threw it around Terry and smothered the flames.

By then, one of McCarty’s brothers had sprinted up the road to get their father. As Terry lay on the ground, he heard his dad racing back down the street, “yelling and screaming like any normal parent would be at that point in time,” he remembers.

His father knelt beside him, unable to touch his son but desperate to understand what had happened. Terry still remembers his dad’s big-lensed glasses, a snapshot of early ’90s fashion — and the reflection in those lenses.

“He was sitting right in front of me trying to just piece together what was going on,” McCarty says. “At that stage, I watched the entire portion of my face just almost slide off in front of him because I could see it in his glasses.”

Days later, Terry was supposed to begin first grade. Instead, he spent the next year in the hospital, enduring burn treatments and surgeries. Returning to school after such a catastrophic injury was challenging, but growing into adulthood brought an entirely new set of struggles.

As a teenager, he was trying to build self-esteem while living in a body forever changed by fire. After high school, he felt unmoored and uncertain about what his future should look like. Then, at 17, another blow: his father died from brain cancer, and Terry lost one of his greatest sources of strength and encouragement.

“I really struggled with the world accepting me for who I was,” he reflects. “The moment somebody looks at me, they automatically go into that victim mindset: ‘Oh, well, he’s severely injured, and I wonder what happened to him.’”

In his mid-20s, McCarty found a powerful sense of direction when he became a volunteer firefighter. It didn’t come easily. He failed the candidate physical agility test (CPAT) three times before making it through and entering the fire academy.

At first, he thrived in training. But as his class moved into more realistic, hands-on drills — particularly live-fire exercises — old trauma resurfaced.

The training burns were tightly controlled and designed to be safe. Still, to McCarty, they felt eerily real.

“Before academy, I wasn’t really afraid of fire and I didn’t have any qualms with it. I didn’t hide from it and I wasn’t scared of it,” he says. “But there was one moment … I saw the fire come out of the ceiling and I saw it rolling towards me, and I had just a very split second where I froze. Because it kind of was the same exact visual of when the kerosene was coming at me.”

Then something unexpected happened.

“As soon as the fire got to me where I was at, and it went over me, it’s like it took that fear away from me when it went by me,” McCarty recalls. “I realized that I was in my bunker gear and that I had the tools to do what I needed to do and I didn’t have to be afraid of it … I feel like that fire literally just cleansed and removed any issues that I had moving forward.”

Moments like that made all the grueling training worthwhile. Even though McCarty eventually stepped away from his role as a volunteer firefighter, the experience reshaped his life.

He shifted his focus to working with nonprofits that support children who are burn survivors, helping them navigate the same physical and emotional challenges he once faced. He admits that he sometimes misses firefighting, and that leaving it behind weighed heavily on his mental health for a while.

Ultimately, though, McCarty sees the fire academy and his time volunteering as a turning point — the path that led him toward an even deeper purpose: using his story, and his survival, to create change for others.