Burn Victim Reborn, Far From the Sea

Julianne Ahlgren is reborn. More than four years ago she went through a fiery hell on an oil tanker about 50 miles off the coast of San Diego, then suffered pain and boredom for many months as she slowly recovered at UC San Diego Medical Center.

A graduate of the Merchant Marine Academy, she was on her first sea duty as third engineer aboard the tanker Taluga when a disastrous accident occurred. Her heroic actions saved her fellow crewmen, but in the process she suffered burns over 83% of her body. No one thought she would survive when she arrived by helicopter at the hospital burn center in Hillcrest.

But the fact that she did makes her the hospital’s prize burn patient, the one who survived the most severe burns. That all happened in 1981, and a bloated and bandaged Ahlgren gritted her teeth and vowed to survive--and to go back to her chosen career as a Merchant Marine officer.

Ahlgren was in the engine room when the accident occurred, spewing burning fuel oil over her and another crew member. She ordered evacuation of the area. Then, despite grave burns, which had taken away most of her outer skin and all of her hair, she went through the ship, alerting others to the fire.

From that inferno and the months and years of painfully slow recovery, Julianne Ahlgren has emerged into a cool, quiet world of the present.

She lives alone in a small house in rural Pinewood, Minn. She reads lots of books, takes long walks, pitches in with the chores at her parents’ farm, travels 30 miles “to town” in Bemidji for physical therapy, vocational counseling and, sometimes, just for fun.

She has had to give up her thoughts of returning to a career on the high seas. “That was so long, long ago,” she said recently. “I know now that I can never do that and I have come to live with this.” She seeks to find a future to replace the one she lost in the fire aboard the Taluga.

Because Ahlgren, now 28, lost most of her outer skin and because human skin transplants were in short supply at the time, her physicians used her as a guinea pig, transplanting a man-made skin-like fiber on her body. That, and her gutsy attitude, saved her life. But it also altered her body’s thermostat so that she cannot tolerate long temperatures warmer than about 60 degrees for very long. The engine room of a ship or the stuffiness of an office are no longer environments she can work in.

“I ride my horse, I like to ski--cross-country, not downhill--I play the piano, I do about everything,” she said. At a trim 120 pounds, she can look back and laugh at her 150-pound hospital weight when “they were stuffing me with proteins and with calories to keep me going.”

She is “winding down” her therapy, having come to the realization that she may never regain the flexibility in her fingers that once allowed her to play the guitar. “I can live with that,” she said. “I have enough.”

Her future, she believes, lies in computers. Perhaps she can start a business in her home after a few advanced courses at Bemidji State University.

She has plenty of friends, both in Pinewood and in far-flung places such as England, from where Dr. Hugh Frank, a now-retired physician who helped her through her healing, called her recently to inquire about her health and life.

She wants her friends in San Diego to know she has plenty of friends in Pinewood, too. They include Mark, (“Please don’t call him a boyfriend”) who was to spend Thanksgiving with her at her parents’ farm.

Her friends respect her wishes and allow her to be alone, independent, most of the time. “I guess I need my own space. I guess this is where I was meant to be. But it’s nice to know I have a lot of friends out there.”