Burn Survivor Recalls Watching His Face ‘Slide Off’ in Reflection (Exclusive)

Editor’s Note: Warning that this article contains graphic images that may be disturbing to some readers.

Just minutes after his body caught aflame, Terry McCarty realized the true extent of his burns, which scorched 73 percent of his skin. While lying on the sidewalk waiting for an ambulance, he unwittingly witnessed the horror of the damage.

When McCarty was 6 years old, he watched his two older brothers curiously attempt to light a bowl of kerosene on fire. They were startled when it actually ignited, and in their surprise, one of the siblings kicked the bowl away. He didn’t realize he punted it directly at McCarty’s chest until it was far too late.

“It wrapped around me like a wet blanket with all the flaming kerosene,” McCarty, now 39, explains. It took him a beat to figure out what was happening — and that it was happening to him. “I thought everything around me was on fire. I didn’t realize I was the one on fire,” he adds.

If gasoline is akin to water, kerosene is closer to a “gelatinous-style fuel,” McCarty notes decades later. “So it took a few seconds for the fire to actually burn through the kerosene layer and then get to my skin … That’s when the realization really kicked in that something was very wrong.”

The searing pain and “chaos” in his brain during that moment were unforgettable, but it wasn’t until quite recently that McCarty remembered the sound. The fire was “deafening,” he tells PEOPLE. “Imagine you’re next to a bonfire, with the loud roaring you hear of a bonfire. Now, try and just place yourself in the center of that.”

A neighbor saw what was happening, and luckily, the onlooker happened to have a sleeping bag on hand from a recent camping trip. He rushed toward McCarty and smothered him with the blanket, extinguishing the flames.

By that point, one of his brothers had run up the road to fetch their father, and while lying on the side of the road, McCarty heard his dad running down the block, “yelling and screaming like any normal parent would be at that point in time,” the burn survivor recounts.

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The horrified parent got down on the ground, kneeling beside his youngest son, looking at him with big-lensed glasses typical of early ‘90s eyewear fashion. McCarty could see the concern in his father’s eyes, but he witnessed something far more haunting in the broad reflection. 

“He couldn’t even touch me, but he was sitting right in front of me trying to just piece together what was going on,” McCarty tells PEOPLE. “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.”

He was supposed to start first grade days after the incident. Instead, McCarty spent the following year in the hospital, undergoing burn treatments and surgeries. Re-entering school after sustaining such an extreme injury proved to be a challenge, but entering adulthood was particularly difficult. He spent his formative teen years developing a sense of self and self-love, but not a complete sense of direction. After his high school graduation, McCarty wasn’t sure what was next for him.

Then, while preparing for life after high school, he suffered a tremendous heartbreak. He was 17 when his father died of brain cancer. McCarty lost one of his greatest sources of hope 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 purpose as a volunteer firefighter. After three failed attempts at the candidate physical agility test (CPAT), he entered the fire academy. He thrived initially; however, training became increasingly difficult for McCarty as his cohort moved into more practical skill tests, like live fire exercises.

While the simulations are entirely safe and thoroughly managed, they’re also extremely realistic, at least according to McCarty.

“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 shares. “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.”

“But 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 continues. “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 just like that one made the fire academy and post-training experience entirely worth it to McCarty, even if he later left his position as a volunteer firefighter. Eventually, he pivoted to work for nonprofits that aid children who are burn survivors like himself. 

He tells PEOPLE that he sometimes misses firefighting, and making the decision to change paths did put a strain on his mental health for some time. Ultimately, however, McCarthy concluded that going through fire academy and volunteering served as a catalyst for him to find even more purpose as a changemaker.