A nurse who was engulfed in flames in a freak accident as she used petrol to burn garden waste says she is lucky to be alive.
Doris Modlin, 32, had gone outside to help her partner who had been trimming trees in their garden but was unaware the pile of leaves and branches had been doused in gasoline.
Surrounded by invisible fumes, she suffered severe burns when she managed to light a match, suddenly engulfing her in flames.
Doris was placed into an induced coma and later spent months recovering from the traumatic ordeal.
She said: "It was like a big freak accident, it sounded like a cannon going off when it finally ignited.
My boyfriend decided to get outside and clean up the yard a little bit and I noticed he was taking a while so I went outside to see if I could be of some assistance.
"He was trimming our trees because they tend to dip down so he was getting a lot of the branches that had broken off and any trash that could be burned - typical maintenance.
"He had a large brush pile and he was like 'I can't get it to light' so I was like 'let me try'.
"I didn't realise at the time but he had poured gasoline on it and he had a box of standard matches.
"So I get up there and try to light the match to throw it onto the brush pile and by the third strike the fumes blew up in my face.
"He witnessed it and he said a huge cloud of fire just surrounded me and then it went away.
"All I remember him telling me was 'run' so I turned around and ran away from it.
"We went inside and he said within a few minutes my lips had turned a solid, ash white and that's when he called the ambulance.”
After the accident Doris was left with first and second degree burns on her face, neck, arms, legs and feet as well as third degree burns on her lips.
An ambulance rushed her from her home in Selmer, Tennessee, to the Magnolia Regional Health Center in Corinth, Mississippi, where she was placed in a coma.
She was put in a medically-induced coma before being airlifted to the burns unit at Regional One Health, in Memphis, Tennessee.
She spent six days in a critical condition, three days of which she was intubated in a coma in the ICU due to doctors' concerns she could die from smoke inhalation.
When she woke up she was in great pain as doctors worked to replace the dead skin, as she was wrapped in bandages.
Having now made a full recovery from the 2018 accident, Doris was left with scarring from her burns.
She added: “When I got home I still had dressing changes and those were very painful - the first couple of days we had to stop every five or ten minutes because I would scream at the top of my lungs because the pain was so bad.
"My boyfriend was taking care of me - I couldn't do anything for myself like my basic needs such as going to the bathroom by myself, wiping myself, bathing myself - he had to do all of that for me.
"It took about a month for me to actually get fully recovered and go back to work.
“I feel lucky to have survived. Since that time we haven't used gasoline to burn anything, we haven't burned anything.
"Any time we've cleaned up the yard we've allowed our city to pick it up or threw it in the woods or something.
"People think 'it can never happen to me' but it can - be aware of what you're doing and what you're using and try alternative methods to get rid of stuff."
