Mom nearly burns alive after COVID robs her of sense of smell

A mother in Maine is lucky to be alive after a gas leak triggered a huge explosion that destroyed her home and left her with debilitating second-degree burns.

Tamara McLean was isolating in her home with COVID-19 in October last year when she put a load of laundry in the dryer in her basement and was halfway up the stairs when the blast hit.

The 45-year-old said she lost her sense of smell while battling the coronavirus, so she couldn’t detect the gas leak, which had been filling her house with noxious propane.

“It was my last day of quarantine, so I was heading out with my friends,” she told Kennedy News Service, adding that her appliances were fueled by propane.

“I hit the dryer button and was on my way upstairs from my basement and an explosion went off,” she continued.

“It blew me back, but I grabbed hold of the wall and was trying to figure out what had happened, because it’s not every day you get a feeling like that — it’s like a blast of hot air that goes through you.”

McLean’s survival instincts kicked in, and she desperately made her way out of the burning house.

“I could hear my hair sizzling and I was burnt,” she recalled. “I could feel my face and arms burnt but I just didn’t know the capacity of it.”

McLean said she started seeing pieces of her house falling, so she ran up the stairs and outside.

“I didn’t look around because my main focus was getting out, but my house had obviously blown up. I was in survival mode, my state of mind was ‘I need to get help right now,’ ” she said.

McLean managed to get in her car, hitting the 911 assist button and driving 4.2 miles to the fire station where she got help.

“When it first happened, I don’t know that I was in that much pain, because I was in shock,” she admitted.

When she got to the fire station, she was air-lifted to the hospital and admitted to the ICU with second-degree burns covering almost one-third of her body.

Doctors cleaned and dressed the second-degree burns on her face, arms, feet and back, and then a week later stapled synthetic skin over the raw skin to close her wounds.

“You have about four to six hours to get intubated, or you won’t make it, because your insides are burnt and swelling,” she said.

“The pain is intense. The only way I can try to explain it is like you have a huge open wound and you have sandpaper and salt water and you’re scrubbing. There’s honestly no comparison.”