| Sources |
- [S52] Miller Funeral Home, (http://www.millerfuneralhome.org), 24 Oct 2009.
Larry Sidney Davis obituary
- [S84] E-Mail, Crystal Coada [coadameadow4@aol.com], 10 Apr 2010.
- [S4] Knoxville News-Sentinel (Tennessee), 15 Dec 2002.
Scarred dreams: Matthew Teffeteller's journey through hell to healing
On Feb. 15, Janace Teffeteller was getting ready to go to bed early when the phone's ring pierced the quiet of her home.
There had been an accident, and a stranger used a cell phone to call from the scene. In the background, she could hear her son screaming.
She didn't know he had been burning alive.
Janace saw Matthew and his wife, Billie Jo, about a half-hour earlier. They stopped by her trailer in rural Blount County, as they did multiple times most days. Billie Jo, who was 22 years old and seven months pregnant with the couple's first child, was joking around, trying on a big, white cowboy hat Matthew wore often, so Matthew decided they should go to Tractor Supply and get her one of her own. They were going line-dancing later that night at Cotton Eyed Joe, and she would wear the new hat.
The day before, they had celebrated the one-year anniversary of a sometimes-tumultuous marriage, but this night out was more for fun than to mark the occasion. The two had tried to convince Janace to come along to Tractor Supply, but she was tired. She stood at the door and watched their taillights disappear down Rocky Branch Road.
She could not have known she had seen Billie Jo for the last time, or that this evening would leave both Janace and her 23-year-old son profoundly scarred.
On the way to Maryville down U.S. Highway 321, Matthew realized Tractor Supply would already be closed. He stopped to get gas, topping off the tank in his 1968 two-door Ford Falcon with high-octane fuel, then headed toward home so the couple could change clothes before going dancing. But after leaving the gas station, Billie Jo wanted a Coke, so at about 8:30 p.m. Matthew slowed and signaled to turn right into the parking lot of the Matador package store.
He didn't see the 1997 Ford F-250 pickup truck slam into the back of his car, wrenching the metal bumper and rupturing the gas tank, but he felt the gas splashing on his skin, the heat of the fire and the impact of the car flipping end-over-end over a curb and up into the parking lot, where it exploded and ignited two other cars before coming to rest upside down. Matthew fumbled with Billie Jo's seat belt but was unable to unfasten it.
Earlier that day, Matthew had been repairing the latch on the driver's-side door. The string he was using to hold that door closed had broken as the car rolled, and the force of another explosion threw him out of the driver's side.
A couple returning home from dinner caught him running, ordered him to drop and roll, and started beating on his flaming clothes, hair and skin. But Matthew didn't feel the flames. Scenes burned in his mind: a split second of hearing Billie Jo scream "Matthew!" as the car rolled - and an eternity of seeing the Falcon burn with her still trapped inside.
---
Matthew Teffeteller and Billie Jo Debty met as teenagers, but they didn't start dating until Jan. 13, 2001, when both were in their early 20s. A month later, they were married in a mass Valentine's Day ceremony at Foothills Mall in Maryville.
"They were both needing someone to love," Matthew's friend Jason Price remembers.
Billie Jo had grown up poor in the North Carolina mountains. With an absent mother and a father in and out of prison, she was raised by an amalgamation of relatives. She worked hard all her life. As a child, with her grandfather and uncles, she gathered and sold creek rock and moss, which was dried and used in gardening or for home remedies. She split and sold firewood as a teenager, and by the time she was a young adult she had held jobs at Fontana Resort and other places.
Billie Jo first met Matthew while visiting an aunt in Blount County. When they started dating, Billie Jo had one brief marriage, at age 18, behind her. Matthew had dated several girls, including one with whom he lived for three years.
At the end of their first date, Matthew took Billie Jo to one of his favorite overlooks in the Smoky Mountains, where they sat and talked for hours.
"We're exactly alike!" he told his friends and family later. And it was evident that they were two of a kind. When Matthew told Janace he met a girl "as tall as me," he meant it: Billie Jo was almost 6 feet tall to Matthew's 6 feet 4 inches.
Their habits, too, were in sync. "He didn't like lettuce on his hamburger; she didn't like it, either," Janace often said. Billie Jo shared all Matthew's passions: outdoor sports, the mountains, guns, fixing and painting vehicles, country music and "glam" metal bands from the 1980s and '90s.
They moved in with Janace but visited North Carolina nearly every weekend. And, their friends and relatives say, they were blissfully happy - except when they weren't.
With no role models for a healthy marriage, the young couple struggled through their first year. Both had short tempers, and for a while, Matthew's temper was made worse by an alcohol problem, which he later overcame. Billie Jo missed North Carolina and left Matthew at least twice; once, he filed for divorce. "But they always stayed in contact," Price says. "They'd come back together, and it was like they were never apart."
By the time of the accident, by all accounts, they had reconciled and were happily expecting the baby. Billie Jo had scheduled an appointment for Feb. 17 to learn the baby's gender, but the couple had already decided the baby was a girl. Matthew named her Jolene after hearing the name in a Dolly Parton song.
The couple had been attending church, and Billie Jo had accepted Christ as her savior a few months before, Janace says. Because Billie Jo hadn't known her own mother, she was especially intent on being a good mother to this baby.
Billie Jo had always wanted a house of her own, and Matthew had secured a $35,000 house just a few miles from Janace. It was old and needed a tremendous amount of work; the entire back of the house was falling off. The couple kept their food in a cooler and cooked with a microwave oven and a gas grill. But to Billie Jo, who at one time had lived in a wafer-board lean-to, it was a palace.
"Billie Jo was so tickled, so proud of that house," remembers her uncle George Bush of Robbinsville, N.C., with whom Billie Jo lived for a few of her teenage years. "She told us about it, and she was just grinning from ear to ear that Matthew loved her enough to get her that house."
But there wasn't much Matthew wouldn't have done for Billie Jo, as Bush saw it.
"Matthew loved her with all his heart," Bush says. "She loved him the same way. They'd have done anything in the world for each other."
---
Minutes after the accident, when the paramedics arrived, it was already clear neither Matthew nor anyone could have gotten Billie Jo out of the car alive. Even Matthew realized it, screaming, "Momma, Billie Jo's dead!" when he knew his mother could hear him over the phone.
When Matthew arrived at Blount Memorial Hospital, more than half of his body was covered with third-degree burns, but he was still conscious - and extremely agitated. Emergency Department nurse Janice Kirkland told Matthew she was going to "put him to sleep" to make him more comfortable, and he thanked her.
Then Kirkland, nurse Lisa Davids and Dr. John Abercrombie worked to get a ventilator tube down Matthew's throat before his airway swelled shut. They cut off his wedding band to keep blood flowing to his fingers. They put in IVs for fluids and pain medication - no easy feat, since Matthew was burned nearly everywhere they would normally put an IV.
An hour or so later, they watched Matthew go to UT Medical Center, where a team of around 20 professionals would assess his injuries and clear him to be flown to the burn unit at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
There wasn't time for the Blount doctor and nurses to process their own emotions; other patients were waiting. But when Billie Jo's body came in a short time later, Abercrombie let another doctor pronounce her dead. He and the nurses knew they'd seen all the hurt they could handle for one night.
They didn't expect to see Matthew Teffeteller again.
Those expectations were wrong.
Feb. 25
Ten days after the accident, Matthew's chance of living is only about 30 percent. During the last 10 days, which he's spent lying in a drug-induced coma in a sterile room with tubes and machines sustaining his life, his mortality fluctuates. Often the chance he will die exceeds the chance he won't.
Down the hall, Janace paces the longest part of the small L-shaped waiting room where she now lives, sometimes in solitude, sometimes with family and friends of other burn patients. When she sleeps, it's on a loveseat-size bench at the room's rear. But sleep and food are afterthoughts; her new life is divided among the telephone, her Bible and the green, machinery-filled room where she can see the son she no longer recognizes.
There are visiting hours, but Matthew's condition is severe enough that if Janace doesn't know to abide by the rules, no one tells her she has to.
"I can go in probably anytime I want to, I guess, unless they're back there doing something," she says. "I don't know for sure, but I feel that he knows I'm back there talking to him."
She tells Matthew she loves him, that his friends have come to see him, that they're all praying for him.
"I never say a lot about the accident; I don't even talk about that," she says. "I just try to tell him he's going to be OK."
She hopes she won't have to be the one to remind Matthew that Billie Jo is gone, as is the baby, who the autopsy showed was indeed a girl.
"I don't think I can handle it myself," she says. She dreads returning home, packing up the things she bought in preparation for her first grandchild - baby clothes the baby will never wear.
"If Matthew don't make it, I've lost my life, too, as far as I'm concerned," she says. "Everything's going to remind me of him.
When Billie Jo's grandmother calls from Robbinsville to ask Janace if the family can bury Billie Jo and the baby there, Janace doesn't know what to say. She can't ask Matthew. She tells them to go ahead, and she sends her brother to North Carolina to videotape the funeral. But she doesn't mention it to her unconscious son.
On Feb. 25, Matthew has his first skin graft, his fourth surgery. In previous operations, surgeons cut through the burned, hardened skin that constricted blood flow and kept the blood from getting to tissue underneath. They later removed the burned tissue - perhaps the bloodiest surgery there is, says trauma surgeon Dr. Jeffrey Guy, because 1 square inch of skin has about 8 feet of blood vessels.
Getting rid of the burned skin was crucial. That dead tissue is poison to the rest of the body; it releases toxins that can affect the body's vital systems.
For this skin graft, the surgeons will take skin off Matthew's right leg to put on his left. For a few weeks, the site from which they take the skin will look like a carpet burn. Because parts of Matthew's body are not protected by skin, the operating room temperature must not drop below 80 degrees. Matthew's burns are wrapped with sterile plastic to hold in his body heat.
This is the first of four skin grafts Matthew will need. His other burns have been covered with cadaver skin to protect them; his immune system is so depressed, his body doesn't know the cadaver skin isn't his own. Matthew will also need parts or all of the fingers on his left hand removed, something that terrifies Janace. Extensive plastic surgery and rehabilitation will follow. Yet, Guy says, "he can do better with an amputation he can use than with long, dead fingers he can't use."
Many patients burned as badly as Matthew don't survive. Others live to deal with both physical and emotional scars. Guy believes Matthew will make it through the "easy part" - hospitalization and surgery - to struggle with the "hard part" - rehabilitation, acceptance and re-entry into society.
The surgery goes well. In three hours, Matthew gets skin grafts and 3 liters of blood. Janace watches as Matthew is rolled back to his room on a gurney. An hour or so later, the burn unit nurses have Matthew cleaned up, reconnected to all his tubes and wires and back on a Gore-Tex mattress that inflates and deflates pockets of air underneath Matthew's body to keep him from getting bedsores. Restraints keep him from thrashing around and shearing off the newly grafted skin.
Janace has to wear a mask, gloves and a plastic suit to visit her son, whose body is an open wound. Right now, infection and the damage to his lungs have the greatest potential to kill Matthew.
"We really do everything we can to try to prevent infections, but we tell families he's going to get infections," Guy tells Janace and others in the waiting room. "He's going to get pneumonia, and he's going to get blood-borne infections and urinary tract infections - hopefully, not wound infections. … It will be four to six weeks before his immune system is back on line. He's sitting there ready for an infection."
True to Guy's word, infections do almost kill Matthew. At times, his lungs are blocked. Twice, his heart stops. The procedures he goes through daily are immensely painful. But, thankfully, he won't remember most of it, says Don Hassencahl, a trauma nurse in the burn unit.
"We're good bartenders," Hassencahl says. "We kind of have a policy of, we give enough (painkillers), whatever that is for that patient."
Hassencahl assures families that genuine pain won't get the body addicted to painkillers. "We know our drugs; we know how long they last. We're there literally doing something excruciatingly painful to those patients," he says. "If they don't remember it, that's the biggest compliment."
Janace doesn't want to remember any of this, either; she only wants her son to live to go home. His scarring skin and shrinking body - as he loses muscle mass daily - seem a betrayal of her strong, stubborn, strapping son.
---
Janace raised Matthew in rural Blount County, near Mount Nebo, the tight-knit community where she grew up. He was her second child; her older son, Rodney, was 10 when Matthew was born.
Matthew's father, Jay Teffeteller, was Janace's second husband; they divorced when Matthew was 7 years old. Then Janace's little boy took on a big role: counseling his mother who was bitterly disappointed by the breakup of her marriage.
"When he was little, Matthew loved church," Janace remembers. "He'd talk a lot about God. When I'd get real upset about my divorce, sitting around crying, he'd say, 'Momma, let's read our Bibles.' … He knew that if we read the Bible, I'd be better."
The pain of the divorce faded for Janace, but she never remarried. Matthew lived with his father for a brief period of time, after Jay had remarried and had another child, but father and son never really developed a close relationship, and Janace regained full custody.
"He didn't spend a lot of time with his daddy," Janace says. "It bothered Matthew - of course, it would any child, being away from their parent like that."
Janace says Matthew enjoyed elementary school. As a teenager, he never had trouble making friends or finding dates, and he loved pulling pranks.
"When he got to know you, he was a big cut-up, but until he got to know you, he was just as shy and straight-up as he could be," his friend Jason Price says.
And he was fiercely loyal: to Ford vehicles, favorite brands, friends and family. Early last year, Janace had blood clots in her legs but refused to go to the doctor. She asked Matthew to go to the store for some aspirin.
"He said, 'Momma, aspirin's not going to help you,' " Janace remembers. "He said, 'You really need to go to the doctor, and you might as well get ready because I'm taking you.' " The clots turned out to be indicative of a medical condition that still gives Janace problems.
During Matthew's time at Heritage High School, Janace says, he got in with the "wrong crowd" for a few years and dropped out of school.
"Beavis and Butt-Head - he thought he was one of them," Price remembers, laughing.
But it wasn't long before Matthew straightened out, Price says. He got his general equivalency diploma and went to work.
Though Matthew held various industrial jobs, he was happiest working outdoors, especially at riding stables and restoring vehicles.
"He's worked on a lot of cars in his lifetime," Janace says. "Anything he could find to work on, he'd work on."
By the time of the accident, he had combined his passions, having just started his own business painting vehicles while working seasonally fighting fires in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
"I worried about him fighting those fires," Janace says. "I'd be on edge because he fought some wildfires, bad ones - and then this happened."
March
Janace has a lot of time to worry - and think - in the tiny room down the hall from Matthew, who remains nearly lifeless and under 24-hour care at Vanderbilt. She worries most about how Matthew will handle the loss of Billie Jo and Jolene, but she also worries about paying her bills. She's been home only once, overnight, since the accident. Laid off just before the accident, she needs to be working, but even more urgent is her need to be with her son.
"It's really hard knowing there's nothing you can do about it but pray and wait," she says. "It being your child, you just really want to do something. I've always took care of him. I can't do nothing now except wait and wait and wait."
Matthew's father comes to visit. Janace, always looking for anything good to come from the tragedy, hopes aloud that Matthew and his father will develop a stronger relationship.
Jason Price and his wife, Michelle, visit. Janace's brothers visit. One of Janace's former schoolmates has a sister in Nashville who visits frequently.
Billie Jo's uncle George Bush visits from Robbinsville. He looks at Matthew's unconscious form, desperately trying to think of something to say. Finally he says, "Matthew, get up out of this damn bed, and let's go fishing!"
As Bush speaks, Matthew's hand moves, just barely - the most movement he's made on his own since being admitted to the burn unit. Janace's heart surges.
Then, in early April, Janace is finally able to talk to Matthew and have him answer back. Almost immediately, he asks the question she's dreaded for months: "Momma, where's Billie Jo?"
Janace can't answer. She leaves and returns with a chaplain, who breaks the news. Matthew is silent.
Later Matthew says he thought someone had told him Billie Jo was alive, although he wasn't sure then how she would have survived the three explosions he remembers. He asks his mother where Billie Jo is buried. Then he doesn't bring it up again for a while.
He asks about his bills. Janace tells him not to worry. He begs for water. He can't have it because he might get it in his lungs. "My bandages get more water than I do," he complains one day in frustration. "When I get out of here, I'm going to take a chair up to the spring, sit there and drink water all day."
At times he accuses Janace of intentionally denying him water. And the young man who hunted, fished, worked on engines and played guitar is angry at his mother for another reason: She "let" them amputate his fingers.
The pain is unbearable, especially when the bandages are changed. Moving any part of his body is torture for Matthew. As for thinking, he tries not to.
"I don't know yet," he says, slowly, when asked if he is thankful to be alive. And though his face stays frozen - held still by the scars - tears begin to mark its topography.
April
Though the long, grueling process of rehabilitation began the day Matthew was admitted to Vanderbilt, the ideal has always been that as soon as he is able, he'll continue in a rehabilitation hospital and return to Vanderbilt for clinics and surgeries.
The reality is that TennCare may or may not pay for that treatment.
Guy starts writing letters to TennCare, knowing that Matthew might have to continue his rehabilitation at Vanderbilt, where physical and occupational therapists are already fighting with the scar tissue that keeps his joints from moving freely. If TennCare won't cover rehab at another facility, Matthew will stay in the burn unit until he is better able to function.
But TennCare agrees to pay for Matthew's rehabilitation, so on April 15, Matthew is discharged from Vanderbilt and admitted to Nashville Rehabilitation Hospital. Here he will re-learn to eat, walk, bathe and otherwise go through life with his new body.
From his first day at Nashville Rehab, Matthew is unhappy. Everything hurts. He doesn't want to be there; he misses his dog and his mountains while also missing the things he'll never have again: his wife, his baby, his Falcon, his face, his hands, his life. Four days after checking in, he looks at the calendar in his room and realizes it's Billie Jo's birthday.
Matthew's caretakers try to get him to recognize and appreciate what he can do, but it's hard to keep him focused on that. Though he can go down stairs, he's scared to even try because of his limited range of motion. He thinks he'll fall, and he can't use his hands to steady himself. He gets frustrated trying to feed himself with stiff arms and no usable fingers. He moves like the bandages he's wearing are bondage.
One day, he goes down to the gymnasium to do physical therapy and, on the mirrored wall, sees his scarred face for the first time.
"I thought I looked horrible," he says. "I didn't expect it to be so bad." After that, he avoids looking in mirrors - even the one he passes every time he enters or leaves his room.
Matthew dreads - and complains unabashedly about - his daily trips to the physical therapy gym, which he refers to as "the torture chamber." He's supposed to do the exercises in his own room, too, but he rarely does. He hates the hospital food and sends Janace out for fast food, which he consumes voraciously.
Though Matthew does learn to feed himself, Janace often ends up doing it for him. She has her own room at the hospital, but she usually stays in his, where his nightmares keep them both awake.
When visits and phone calls from friends and family taper off, Janace gets the brunt of his anger.
"Why didn't you just let me die?" he asks her more than once. "Why did you let them cut my fingers off?"
He's afraid he'll never play guitar again, never four-wheel. "I won't be able to work," he says. "I won't be able to drive my truck." He's scared of not being able to take care of himself. He's scared he'll never get home to the mountains he loves.
In mid-May, however, he does.
May
Matthew's return home is bittersweet, at best. He moves his bed from the house he shared with Billie Jo to his old bedroom in Janace's trailer. He still needs Janace's help with activities of daily living, which frustrates and angers him. One night he goes into a rage when he can't get his belt buckle fastened.
"No, I've got to do it myself!" he yells at Janace when she starts to help him. "You won't always be here!"
Matthew can't cook his own meals, tie his own shoes or pick up his pills and put them in his mouth. He needs his mother's help opening bottles, closing shirts and pants and keeping himself clean. Every aspect of his life has changed.
But he doesn't have time to settle into that new life before he's due back at Vanderbilt for still more surgery: plastic surgery on his lower eyelids, to keep them from drooping, and more skin grafts. He also has a monthly clinic visit so doctors can look at his burns and check his progress.
In July, while at Vanderbilt for a skin graft, Matthew contracts an infection and gets deathly ill. He is in the hospital more than two weeks. When he recovers, he's furious - at the hospital, the people there, Janace, God.
Janace doesn't know how to deal with the new Matthew, who has a shorter, stronger temper and a sense of urgency about everything. When he's home from Vanderbilt, she says, he wears himself out trying to squeeze as much activity as possible into every day.
"He's wanting to be back like he was, but he's not never going to get the same as he was before the wreck happened," she says.
Experts say it's common for burn survivors to be more irritable, quicker to anger and more frustrated than before. Some burn survivors describe their lives as "an emotional roller coaster" with periods of feeling better before dropping back down.
Matthew has some days of despair and nights of terror, but he's working for his own kind of closure. Almost immediately after returning home, he goes to the junkyard to see the burned-out shell of the car that once got all his spare time and money. The Falcon had belonged to Matthew's grandfather, and his father had given it to him about a year earlier. Matthew had intended it to be a show car; he had completely reworked the engine and interior and had half-finished painting the exterior. Seeing what is left is just one more blow.
He visits Blount Memorial Hospital and meets the nurses and doctor who helped save his life. He meets with the state trooper who responded to the accident scene. He goes back to the accident scene itself, where metal is still embedded in the asphalt on Highway 321.
A few days later, his hands still bandaged, he drives to Robbinsville to visit Billie Jo's family and her grave.
There's been tension between Matthew and some of Billie Jo's family in the past, but if there are bad feelings toward him now, at least they aren't evident. Matthew stops by to see Bush.
"Billie Jo was my favorite niece. I miss her a sight," Bush says, sadly. Then, looking at Matthew, he adds, "Matthew's been in worse shape than I've been in. I don't even know what he's been through. But when he's ready to talk, I'll be there."
Bush, who is the brother of Billie Jo's mother, says he doesn't talk to Billie Jo's paternal relatives often, but he knows they, too, miss her terribly. He doesn't know whether some of them, already bitter about the relationship, indirectly blame Matthew for Billie Jo's death. He himself doesn't.
"Matthew's my nephew, and that's all there is to that," Bush says. "We've all lost somebody who's special to us, and it's just something we've got to learn to live with."
Later, when Matthew is out of earshot, he muses: "Matthew was a nice-looking young man. This accident took a lot from him."
Billie Jo is buried in a quiet churchyard cemetery, next to her paternal grandfather. She shares a tombstone with Jolene; it bears both the Teffeteller and Debty names on the front. On the back is a poem, "Rushing Without Realizing," that Billie Jo wrote as a child:
People rushing down the busy streets
As I slowly walk
Realizing how people rush by life
Without realizing how special the world is.
So when you are out there
Take time and don't rush by life.
Realize how special the whole world is
Before it's gone.
Flowers are planted and placed in the still-fresh dirt. Stuffed animals smile sweetly from the ground.
Matthew contemplates the grave.
"That's where she would have wanted to have been - right beside her grandfather," he says. "She thought the world of him; he practically raised her.
"I couldn't have asked for it to be done any better."
September
By September, Matthew has been to Billie Jo's grave eight times, all but twice by himself.
"I just sit over there in the graveyard is all I do," he says. "Sometimes I go talk to her family, but not very much."
Where Matthew really feels Billie Jo's presence is in the house they shared. All but one of the wall calendars still say "February," and Billie Jo's clothing litters the bedroom floor.
"She loved it here," he says.
Since returning home, Matthew has been working on the house, filling cracks and painting walls just as he was doing before the accident. With some help, he's completely redone the bathroom. He's installed an air conditioner. On one of his post-accident trips to Robbinsville, he's collected a bassinet and some other things intended for Jolene; he's keeping them in the house. Asked why, he says simply, "I just wanted them."
Billie Jo's pool cue is in the kitchen. A love note she began writing Matthew but never finished is in the living room. "I really do love you with all of my heart, body and soul," it says in part. "Nobody could ever even come close to comparing to you in anyway."
Matthew picks up the newspaper he bought Feb. 15 but never read, then looks at his horoscope. It tells him to be creative and wake up to a part of life he's been ignoring, and that a project done correctly will make him rich. Billie Jo's says, in part, "Tonight will be lucky for settling disputes." He sighs and says, "They're usually not accurate."
Janace says that months ago she accompanied Matthew to the house to pack up the couple's belongings.
"We got up there, and he walked through the house, and then he said, 'Don't touch nothing,' " she says. "He said to just leave it like it is. He don't want nothing touched or moved."
Janace dreads going to the house, where Billie Jo will never again come out of the bedroom to greet her, ready to go to dinner or shopping or driving in the mountains. Matthew, however, goes there "sometimes 10 times a day," Janace says. He mows the yard, works on cleaning out the basement, picks up trash and hauls it off. He returns to Janace's at night, when being at the house depresses him.
Soon after returning to Blount County, Matthew had the car towed to Janace's yard, which she's not at all happy about. "It depresses me, seeing that car," she says. "It's a constant reminder."
Matthew has the engine running in the battered Falcon. He may put the engine in a pickup truck he's bought for $200. He's figured out a way to rig his painting equipment so he can paint vehicles even without fingers, and he uses tools to do what his hands no longer can. Sometimes Janace helps him with bolts, wires, caps and other things that require grip.
Seeing the car doesn't bother Matthew that much, although he admits, "Sometimes at night, I can smell that foul, burnt smell."
The car is no more a reminder of the accident than is his everyday life. "He'll talk about her being in that car, and about seeing her burn," Janace says, "and when he talks about it, that's all I can see."
Janace thinks Matthew needs counseling, but she doesn't know how to make him go. Among the myriad pills he takes daily is an antidepressant, but Janace isn't sure it's working. Matthew still has nightmares, and he itches constantly. He stays up all night, working on CB radios, and she stays up helping him. Janace is physically and emotionally exhausted.
"I don't have a life because I've constantly got to be with him, help him and do for him," she tells friends, almost in tears. "I can't do nothing at all that I need to do, and I don't get to do anything I want to do. If he could get to where he could use his hands and fix him something to eat and do what he has to …"
She trails off. She can't get Matthew to brush his teeth or trim his toenails; she can barely get him to shower. "He says it hurts," she says.
In the meantime, she's worried about losing her home. The payment on her trailer is $410 a month, and she's been living off last year's income tax return, which is about to run out. All of her brothers work, so there's no one to stay with Matthew if she gets a job. The blood clots in her legs have gotten worse; lack of sleep probably isn't helping her health.
But except for the itching, which is constant and annoying, Matthew is doing better. Barring some numbness in one leg, most of his body is functioning normally. His hands are the exception. "Oh, Lord, they hurt," he says. "All I have to do is hit them against something, and I'm crying my eyeballs out."
Though he's been officially declared disabled now and gets a monthly check for $670, Matthew is anxious to return to work. But the job he loved, fighting fires in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, is probably out of his reach now, and his lack of functional fingers limits his options somewhat. He contents himself with mowing yards and doing odd jobs.
"As long as he's busy, he's fine," Janace says. But she looks worried.
- [S4] Knoxville News-Sentinel (Tennessee), 15 Dec 2002.
Scarred dreams: Matthew Teffeteller's journey through hell to healing (continued)
November
Matthew has made some decisions. First, he's decided to give up the house. It's too much a reminder of what he's lost, and he needs the money to help Janace make payments on her trailer. After all, she helps him from the time he gets up in the morning until he goes to bed at night.
Second, he's had enough of medical procedures for a while. Months ago, he discarded his pressure garments - elastic clothing that presses against wounded areas to help control the formation of hard, deforming scars - in favor of blue jeans and Western shirts. He experimented with skipping his pills, which include an anti-anxiety drug, but found that "if I don't take my medication, I turn into Satan." He's also called Vanderbilt, expressing a strong desire to stay out of the hospital altogether, through at least the end of November.
Matthew is now debating whether to have reconstructive surgery on his hands.
"I don't know if I want anything done to this one or not," he says, gesturing to his right hand. "I'm getting to where I can use it pretty good. I can paint a car."
Matthew would need a series of surgeries to unclench the fingers on his right hand and separate what remains of the fingers fused together on his left hand. Surgeons would also fashion a thumb on his left hand.
Other surgeries available to him include procedures to loosen scar tissue on his left elbow and neck, and more reconstruction of his lip.
"I'd like to get his hands completed so he can be more independent," surgeon Guy says. At the same time, he understands Matthew's eagerness to be done with surgery.
"As the physical wounds get better, the psychological wounds get worse," Guy says. "People begin to bear that cross, therapy becomes less important to them, and they perhaps become a little less compliant."
The success of Matthew's recovery now rests almost entirely upon Matthew, Guy says. If he wears the pressure garments and does the exercises consistently, follows his doctors' suggestions and goes through more operations, he's bound to fare better physically. Yet "who am I to dogmatically tell someone what's right and what's wrong when it comes to something like that?" Guy asks. Going through those things is "a tough way to live," he says.
On the parts of his body that were burned, Matthew is experiencing a different pain, which he attributes to cold weather. Janace rubs his left arm and his hands, which seems to help. He wonders whether winter will bring more pain than healing.
Yet Matthew has also decided his life must have greater purpose. To that end, after months of being "too mad" at God, he's started attending church again, although it's not the same church he attended with Billie Jo. One night, he speaks to members of a men's fellowship group at Green Meadow Church of God in Alcoa, telling them of all the times he's "cheated death": car accidents, riding bulls, hospital infections.
"Mom prayed, and I made it through, and here I am today," he says, to a chorus of "Amens." "I don't understand it myself. … I think I need to try to find out what He has planned for me."
Later, he outlines some other goals. He's traded the $200 truck for a Mustang he's planning to restore. He got a computer and is learning to use the Internet. If he decides to have surgeries, he wants to be through with them by the end of February. He's considering moving to Bear Creek, Mont., a place he's seen only in pictures, and he wants Janace to go with him.
"It was the most beautiful place I'd ever seen in my life," he says. "Green, grassy fields, snow-capped mountains - just peaceful. … I want to get away from society for a while."
Dating isn't on his radar.
"First of all, no one would have me," he says, laughing. "I look like a freak show!"
Then he admits some girls have expressed interest, "but I just don't think about it. I'm not ready yet."
He still thinks about Billie Jo daily.
"I think about how stupid I was sometimes, how I argued over nothing," he says. "I didn't realize it could all end. If I'd known what was going to happen, I'd have spent my time a lot more wisely."
Matthew says he's coming to terms with Billie Jo's death.
"If she would have made it, she'd have been suffering like me," he says. "I wouldn't have wanted that."
That doesn't mean he's not still angry. Recently, after a night spent with his cousin line-dancing and drinking - which Matthew rarely does now - Matthew let loose, with venom, on the topic of the driver of the truck that hit him that night, who wasn't charged. Talking about the accident sometimes makes him want to curse and hit things; other times it simply makes him sad and worried. He has filed a lawsuit against the other driver and agonizes about seeing the man in court, wondering what feelings that will bring up.
So there are good days, such as the day Matthew laboriously replaces a steering column all by himself, and bad days, such as the day he gets his "retirement papers" from the forestry service. Janace is waiting for a time the good days outnumber the bad. Matthew has, to her relief, made an appointment for some counseling. She says she'll go with him and might attend some support group meetings. She has her own anger, as much as it shames her, toward the other driver, and she could use help dealing with the abrupt change in plans for her future.
Matthew thinks he glimpsed his future a few weeks ago, during an encounter with an auto-parts store employee.
"He was looking up my part number in the book, and I noticed his hands looked like mine," Matthew says. "Then I looked at his face. I said, 'You've been burnt, haven't you?' "
The other man was reluctant to talk, though he did tell Matthew the scars and itching still bother him almost 30 years after the accident.
"That depressed me," Matthew says. Yet overall, "I think I'm a lot better than I should be" emotionally, he says.
At 23, Matthew has experienced more than some people experience in a lifetime - and some mornings he's not sure he wants to see what else life has in store for him.
Other mornings, he knows he does. Matthew wants to love life again; he's trying to get everything he can out of it.
Talking to other burn survivors might help, he thinks. Or going to church. Or moving to Montana.
Or time.
Kristi L. Nelson can be reached at 865-342-6434 or nelsonk@knews.com.
- [S4] Knoxville News-Sentinel (Tennessee), 21 Jun 2009.
A dream realized: Matthew Teffeteller's first Father's Day
Seven years after a crash stole his family and his health, Matthew Teffeteller looks ahead with hope - and a new son
By Kristi L. Nelson
It was on Groundhog Day - Feb. 2 - that Matthew Teffeteller first saw his son.
Matthew Marion Teffeteller Jr. came out cone-headed from his trip through the birth canal, mottled and scrunched up, and his father, who had never seen a newborn, worried that something was "wrong" with the baby. Only after being reassured by his wife, Rebecca Teffeteller, did he hold the brand-new boy in his arms, a mixture of hope, wonder and fear in his heart.
Perhaps Matthew just wanted to be sure his long-awaited child had the gift of physical perfection. His own face, his body and his heart still bear the scars from another February day seven years before.
There was a time Matthew thought he'd never again feel joy, his losses so deep, so consuming, nothing could fill the void.
And there will be no forgetting those losses. They're seared in his memory.
But time helps the healing. Love helps heal. A 4-month-old who "smiles at Daddy" and is happy hiking in Matthew's beloved mountains, strapped to him in a Snugli, is helping Matthew heal.
It took years for Matthew to get to this point. For the first couple of years after the accident, he relived it over and over in his mind. Feb. 15, 2002, driving up U. S. Highway 321 in Blount County toward his Walland home with his wife, Billie Jo, seven months pregnant with their first child, a girl they'd planned to name Jolene. Slowing and signaling to turn right, just before a Ford F-250 pickup crested the hill and plowed into their 1968 Ford Falcon. Gas splashing and igniting. The explosion. The fire.
Billie Jo and the baby didn't survive. Matthew did, with third-degree burns to his face, arms and hands.
At first he didn't know how he felt about that. After he awoke from his month-long coma, everything was painful. He'd lost his love, his looks, many of his fingers and the ability to do the things he liked best. Play guitar. Work on old cars. Fish, hunt. He longed to come back to the mountains; Matthew was always happiest outdoors.
On top of that, he endured excruciating surgeries and therapies, first at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, then at a Nashville rehabilitation center. He came home hurt and angry. But eventually, Matthew decided he would not be helpless. The anger subsided, though depression came and went, and Matthew learned how to live with what he had left.
"It's like everything before my car wreck was a different life, completely different," Matthew says. "It's like I was in one world and woke up in another one."
Rebecca Diane Davis didn't know the young man who came back from Vanderbilt prone to fits of temper and deep depressions, eventually casting off his pressure garments and vowing no more surgeries.
But she remembered a cute boy at Greenback Middle School who'd asked her to go steady back when she "didn't care about boys." She told him no, that they could be friends.
"That made him mad," she says, laughing.
From time to time, "I wondered where he'd went and what he was doing," she says. Later, she heard about the accident, read newspaper stories about Matthew, "but I didn't know how to get hold of him."
Then one day early in 2008, she was talking to a friend, and Matthew's name came up. The friend, it turned out, was a distant cousin and took Rebecca to see Matthew.
They spent more and more time together: talking, laughing, driving around in the mountains. He took her four-wheeling. He opened up a little.
Matthew had been hesitant to date again, in part because he was sensitive about his appearance. Even when girls openly showed interest in him, he wondered what their motives were.
But Rebecca was different. He enjoyed getting to know her again, and he found the woman just as appealing as he had the girl who was his middle-school crush.
Neither of them can remember if Matthew actually proposed. But they'd talked enough about marriage that Rebecca wasn't surprised when Matthew took her to Kay's Jewelers one day and told her, "Pick out what you want."
They were married May 28, 2008.
And the next month at Rebecca's doctor's appointment, she found out she was "just barely pregnant." She called Matthew to tell him. He laughed, happy, surprised, excited.
Rebecca's pregnancy was uneventful, except that she had gestational diabetes. She was so calm the night her water broke that Matthew didn't think she was serious. She had to insist, multiple times, that she wasn't joking about needing to go to the hospital. Because she works for a Covenant Health affiliate, she chose to have her baby at Parkwest Medical Center - a long drive from Walland on a foggy night.
"Junior," as he's called, was born the next day during a big snow, making Matthew glad they'd driven in the night before. He gave his parents a scare when his blood sugar was low.
"They talked about sending him to Children's Hospital," Matthew says. "That really tore me up pretty bad. I did a lot of worrying and crying at first. But after I found out he was going to be all right, I felt a lot better."
Rebecca went back to work after her six-week maternity leave, and it was clear it made more sense for Matthew to be the stay-at-home parent. He'd worked various jobs since the accident, most recently in construction until that work was swallowed up by the flagging economy, but he wasn't then employed.
At first, Matthew was nervous. But, it turns out, you don't need 10 fingers to deftly change a diaper. Or to give a bottle. Or to rub a baby's belly, hold a baby, rock a baby and gaze at him in wonder.
Or to put the car seat in the Jeep and take the baby four-wheeling, as Matthew did one day, to his mother's astonishment.
"He said, 'It's too pretty a day for a baby to be stuck indoors,' " Janace Teffeteller remembers, laughing.
The one thing Matthew won't do is bathe Junior.
"I'm afraid that I can't hold onto him," he says.
And often Janace, with whom Matthew and Rebecca live, helps feed Junior now that he's eating solid food.
"He's kind of messy," Matthew says, and tiny spoons are hard for Matthew to hold.
Junior is an alert baby, chubby and good-tempered, an "easy boy," he says.
"I'm glad I get to spend time with him," he says. "Maybe that will help our bond when he gets older."
Matthew's bond with his own father, who divorced Janace when Matthew was 7, is somewhat strained. As Matthew grew older, they didn't spend a lot of time together. He plans the opposite for himself and Junior.
"I want to be there more for him," Matthew says. When he's older, "I'd like to take him out on the lake, up into the mountains, and show him stuff I know about."
He knows that time will come quickly.
"I take him riding up around Chilhowee Lake - he loves riding," Matthew says. "We go to McDonald's and I get a hamburger. And I think, one day soon he'll be wanting him a Happy Meal."
As much as Matthew loves Junior, he can't help but think of Jolene, his lost baby, from time to time. "I still get depressed when I think about" the accident, he says.
Sometimes he'll talk to Rebecca about it. "Sometimes he just wants to go for a drive," she says.
Matthew, Rebecca and Junior have been up to North Carolina several times to visit Billie Jo's family and the grave where she and Jolene are buried.
The first grandchild on both sides of the family, Junior is doted on by Janace and by Rebecca's parents, who have a small farm in Greenback where they raise goats, rabbits and birds. Matthew is sure Junior will grow up an animal lover.
"I hope he's a good person and don't get into a lot of trouble," like Matthew sometimes did when he was younger and wilder, he says. wOf course, he hopes to pass on his love of the outdoors, country music, cars, but "the main thing is, I hope he turns out to be a good person."
"As long as he's healthy and happy, that's pretty much it," Rebecca says.
As for Matthew, his scars still hurt. Cold weather makes them especially painful. He may have to have more surgery to loosen hardened scar tissue, though he's hoping to avoid it if possible. He worries about that.
He worries sometimes that Junior will someday be teased because his father doesn't look "normal."
He worries about money, how to stretch it further, how to provide for his family.
And he still worries each and every time his precious family gets into a car, even as he points out, logically, how much safer newer cars are. He knows the exact location of the gas tank in the used Lincoln he bought recently.
But the joy? It's worth every bit of the worry. Matthew looks at his wife and son, and he chokes up, just a little bit.
"I never thought I'd ever have a family again," he says, softly.
Kristi L. Nelson may be reached at 865-342-6434.
- [S131] Divorce Record.
Husband's Name Wife's First Name Wife's Maiden Name County Court Date of Divorce File #
TEFFETELLER JOSEPH M JANACE M NOT GIVEN BLOUNT CIRCUIT 01-05-1990 03664
- [S58] Marriage Certificate.
Groom's Name Bride's First Name Bride's Maiden Name County Date of Marriage File #
TEFFETELLER MATTHEW M BILLIE J DEBTY BLOUNT 02-14-2001 06830
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