We're All Insane - I Was Burned Alive at Work

Episode Date: October 11, 2026

A year ago Remington Weckbacher, known online as RemTheBurntGuy, survived an oil field explosion that left him with burns covering more than 80% of his body. We talk about what happened after he came home, including PTSD, night terrors, flashbacks, learning how to cope with trauma, and the mental work that came with rebuilding his life.  Check Out Remington: → GoFundMe → Instagram → YouTube → TikTok → Facebook Sponsored By: → Shopify | Every story has a turning point. If you're ready to build something of your own, start your journey with a free trial at https://shopify.com/insane → HERS | Ready to reach your goals? Visit https://forhers.com/insane to access personalized, affordable care for weight loss, hair, menopause, and more. On This Episode We Cover:  → 00:00:00 - Introduction  → 00:00:43 - What has the recovery process been like?  → 00:02:45 - What is the surgery process like?  → 00:04:43 - What did his girlfriend ask him the morning of the accident?  → 00:05:49 - What was his job?  → 00:06:53 - How did his work day start? → 00:08:20 - How did the oil field explosion start? → 00:11:42 - What happened when the explosion threw him from the rig? → 00:13:07 - How big was the explosion and could it have been prevented?  → 00:14:19 - How did he survive being trapped in the fire? → 00:16:57 - How did they put the fire out?  → 00:18:21 - What happened to the two men that passed away?  → 00:19:36 - What was going through his mind when it happened? → 00:20:42 - How did they finally call for help? → 00:23:32 - What happened during the ambulance ride to the hospital? → 00:25:41 - What did he experience while he was unconscious? → 00:28:55 - What were the first surgeries he went through?  → 00:31:04 - What was his daily care like in the hospital?  → 00:32:01 - How bad was the infection he had from the water?  → 00:33:28 - What was it like waking up after two and a half months? → 00:35:48 - How did his family cope while he was in the hospital? → 00:37:03 - What happens during recovery from severe burns? → 00:40:01 - How was his mental health throughout the process? → 00:42:35 - Why did he start going to therapy?  → 00:44:21 - When did he reconnect with other survivors?  → 00:45:46 - Why did he decide to leave the oil field? → 00:47:06 - What are his future goals?  → 00:49:02 - Why did he start sharing his story online? → 00:51:25 - How did the fire impact his memory?   → 00:52:47 - What surgeries and procedures are next for him?  → 00:54:25 -  How are skin grafts helping him regain mobility? → 00:58:42 - How did he learn to feel comfortable in his new body? → 01:03:19 - How does he want to use his experience to help others? → 01:06:28 - How did he learn to cope with his trauma? → 01:07:36 - What everyday things became difficult after the accident? → 01:12:43 - How is he using his experience to educate others?  → 01:16:46 - How does workers compensation work?   Further Listening → My Boyfriend Stabbed Me 11 Times Then Killed Himself More We Are All Insane: → OFFICIAL MERCH NOW AVAILABLE - code INSANE10 gets you 10% off for a limited time → Join We’re All Insane Mailing List for EXCLUSIVE Content + Discounts  For early releases, uncensored videos and plenty of exclusive content please subscribe to the We Are All Insane subscription channel at https://wereallinsane.supportingcast.fm/. It's $5.99 a month and watchable on Apple and Android mobile apps, Roku TV, Apple TV and Amazon Fire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, don't forget about We're All Insane Plus, where you can get access to bonus episodes and early releases on Fridays to every Sunday's episode. You can subscribe an app on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube, or visit we're all insane.com. I'm Remington Weckbocker, and I'm Rem the burnt guy on several different social medias. And I was burnt in an oil field explosion about a year ago. I'm over 80% burnt with third degree full thickness burns. And it covers almost the entirety of my left leg from the bottom of my stomach, clear up to my head, front and back. And it's given me some trouble, but we're doing our story online of how we're getting back on our feet and moving forward.

And you look amazing for it being only a year, really. I just had a laser surgery about two weeks ago now. Okay. And that laser surgery, it just takes, it's a CO2 laser that burns into my hands and my arms and all of my burnt skin. Yeah. And it slowly over time loosens and smooths my skin. Wow. And in the time that we are.

are letting it heal from the CO2 laser. We have to put different creams and stuff on my arm to help encourage it to heal and soften. And it's, it really takes time and it's crazy what they can do because- Oh, it's insane. Currently, I go to OSU Wexner in Ohio, and it is an amazing hospital. Right. They have taken care of me from the first day. And we have zero. zero complaints. They are the absolute best. My care team, they do everything possible to make sure that I can be myself at the fullest. Yeah, that's incredible. And we have more surgeries coming up. I mean, I have issues where my armpits, their skin connected from here to here, and it's like a batwing. And so basically they're wanting to do a zoplasty, which is just rearranging the skin in a way that allows me to go from being able to raise my arm up this high to clear up above my head.

And how many surgeries have you gotten so far? So far we're at about 20. I don't really like to keep track exactly because there's going to be so many. and the more you sit and think about it and keep track, the more you start to worry yourself. I was going to ask you, do you feel any fear when those surgeries come up or have you gotten a little more used to it? When it comes to my laser surgeries, I'm used to them. Do they put you under for those? They do.

Okay. Prior to having my neck surgery done, they actually had failed attempts to put me under anesthesia because my neck. wouldn't lean back far enough to get the inhibition tube in. Wow. So since we've gotten this surgery, it's so much easier for them to get my inhibition tube in and actually get me under anesthesia. So it really helps. Okay.

And this is actually skin from my right leg on my thigh. They cut me from about the top of my knee all the way up to my hip and wrap that skin around my neck at about. two inches thick. Wow. To help give me mobility again. And once this all fully heals, this will be able to look just like anybody else's neck. Right, because it just starts off where it's a little bit more swollen, right? And then it'll eventually just kind of like it, it's amazing what the body does. Yeah. It's incredible. And if they go back in my videos and and want to watch.

I've actually been filming from almost a week after my surgery all the way up to current day. And you can see slowly how my neck goes down. Yeah, the progress. I mean, day by day, it shrinks and it looks more normal. But it's still, I call it my bullfrog neck. It's okay. But for now. For now, it's letting me live a normal life.

I can still drive a car. I can still work on anything that I want to work on. It's just some things I have to take more caution. Absolutely. We'll walk us through the day that everything happened and we'll go from there. So the day that this happened, it was supposed to be a routine day. And me and Emma had just started dating two or three months prior to this accident happening. Okay.

And of course, that day, she decided that she wanted to stay the night. And that morning, I was getting up and getting ready to leave. And she was telling me, don't go. Like, stay home with me today. Like, I just really want you to stay home. And I said, I really would. But we have a cement plug today on the well that we have to do. Now, was she wanting you to stay home just to spend more time with you, or was that because she had a feeling?

I think it was a little bit of both. Okay. But that day she really was trying to get me to stay home, and I told her if it wasn't any other day, but a cement plug day, I would. So what was your job? My job was to go out on a service rig, which is just a drilling rig for oil, that, was going into the ground and pulling out all of the old contents of a well and setting them off to the side and taking and running our equipment down in it and then setting cement all the way from the bottom of the well to the top. Okay.

And this was to seal off all of those gases and fluids that could possibly leak out into the environment. And we were hired by the state to do this. Okay, got to. And it was a good job. It was making me enough money to get me by. So I kind of enjoyed it. And at the same time, nobody really loves their job completely. There's always something.

And how long were you working at this job? I had worked there for a little over a year and a half at the point that this accident happened. Gotcha. And that day I left the house, left Emma, and we went down to the, the well sites and rode up into the woods where our equipment was, which the well was about a mile back into the woods. And we were on Wayne National Forest, which is a very big forest from where we're from. And it's protected, and there's not a whole lot back there. So we go back into the woods and we started our day with putting some more pipe down into the ground to get our

equipment down to the depth that we wanted. And once we got it down to the depth that we wanted, we got the other crew that was coming to work that day into the well site. And they were bringing the cement trucks and the cement. So they get their equipment up there and we start working together hooking all of our equipment up and making it to where we can start pumping cement down the well and we get everything hooked up and ready to go and we start pumping and we get back almost immediately what we call circulation and circulation is just fluid moving back up the hole and coming out to the ground well once we get that circulation it starts to ramp up and pressure.

And once it ramps up and pressure, it immediately goes from like 5, 10 PSI to like 3 or 400 PSI. And once it hits that 3 or 400 mark, it's pushing gases like

H2S and regular stale gas and also drip, which is a fine mist of gas that's a lot more concentrated and really, really flammable. Well, it's pushing all this along with oil back out into the air. And one of our water trucks takes in that air and oil and oil and gas and whatnot. And it causes that engine to overreve, pushing past its limits and then the engine

actually explodes, which is what starts the chain reaction. Okay. And once that engine exploded, there was one of my friends in that cab who was also severely burnt, and he's still with us. He was burnt about 50% of his body. And I was standing on the deck of our rig. Okay. So he was in the truck.

Okay. I was standing on the deck of our rig looking down. at the actual well itself. And when this all happens, of course, all that gas is being shoved right into my face. Yeah. It ejects me off the back of our rig, and I land about 15 feet behind me on a rock, and it knocks me out cold. In my opinion, when it comes to starting a business,

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slash insane to start your free trial. That's Shopify.com slash insane. Go to Shopify.com slash insane today to hear your first, cha-ching. And once my adrenaline kicks in, I shoot back awake. and at this point my shirt is already completely burn off of me and my pants are still on fire and I get up and I start running and screaming and I'm still on fire I'm trying to look for a place that's not on fire to stop drop and roll and put myself out like we're all taught well I get to a place where I think I can do that and I hit the ground and it's not working it's not working my pants are covered in oil and gas. It's never going to go out like that.

Right. And beside me, there's an embankment with a pretty far drop. And I'm looking between our burning rig and equipment and this embankment. And I'm thinking, I have to jump and get down here and get away from this and then worry about getting myself put out. So I jump off the embankment. and I strip my clothes off of me. The only thing I have left is my underwear and a sock.

And so I sit down there and I can still hear the guys behind me yelling and screaming. And I don't know if my friends are all still alive. Right. So when this exploded, it was like a huge explosion. And it's still every, basically that whole piece of equipment is on fire. The whole piece of equipment and several trucks are actively burning, as well as a half round, which is just like a big giant tank cut in half, full of oil is also on fire. Now, was there any way that this could have been done differently or like prevented? Or like was it just kind of like the way it was set up, it's hard to kind of avoid that kind of thing?

Well, there were ways that it could have been avoided. And the company that was with me when this happened, they were cited for a lot of different things by OSHA. And of course, now we look back at it. We look at everything that we could have done differently. But in the moment, we were just trying to get our job. Right, exactly. And nobody really thinks about stuff like that until it happens. Yeah, nobody thinks everything's going to explode.

Yeah. Okay, so you're down off the embankment and you hear everybody screaming. And at this point, were you able to stop the fire on your body? Well, I was able to stop the fire on my body, but I can still hear all of our equipment burning and crackling. And of course, I don't know what to do. I'm lost myself. And I'm sitting there and I'm thinking to myself, my family and my friends and my girlfriend are. are completely oblivious to the fact that I'm likely going to die out here.

And I have no way to contact them because there's zero self-service where we are. Were you in any pain? Do you remember? We were all in excruciating pain. Okay. I mean, everybody was yelling and screaming and groaning. And, I mean, when I look down at my body, I remember holding out my arm. and seeing from about my elbow to my wrist, that length of skin hanging off of my arm in just ribbons.

And that was covering my entire body. And I'm just thinking, what am I going to do? There's no way I come back from this. And of course, in that moment, you don't think there's any way you're going to come back with this because for a lot of people and a lot of instances, is fire is death. Yeah.

I mean, there's a very easy happening in that moment that one small detail changes and you're gone. Right. And so we go and I'm sitting there and I'm waiting on everybody to kind of get put together and see if anybody else is still alive. And I find out that there are others that are still okay. And I see them walking down the hill. And I muster my strength and I managed to yell through all the smoke inhalation down to them.

And I'm like, hey, I'm up here. And they're like, you need to get down here. You're going to die. Yeah. Because where I had landed was right in the path of where our rig would later start to kind of crumble and lean to. Okay. And so our rig never actually fell over on its side thanks to a tree that was in the mast of it. But if it would have, it probably would have landed very close, if not on where I was laying at.

So we all get together and we go down to a creek that's about 100 or so yards away. And once we get down there, we all lay down in the creek and start splashing ourselves off. And we're trying to get ourselves cool. But at the time, we didn't know that in this creek there was some sort of a parasite that would give us a very serious infection that had only been. been seen in a human three other times in the world. Oh my gosh. And our doctors didn't know how to treat this. And how many of you were down there?

There was three of us that contracted it. Okay. And then in total, how many people got burned? So in total, there was me and the other major burn survivor. And then there were our two other other older gentleman that passed away that were major burn and then there was one other person that was there that got minor burns and then our inspector that was there and he got some minor flash burn the two men that passed away were they also inside of the machine or where were they when it happened

The two other guys, one of them was running the cement truck. And the other one was our drill operator. And he was actually holding onto a hose that was blasting out all of that oil pressure and gas and stuff. And so it threw him. And he was unconscious, which when we were down there splashing ourselves off, we realized that we didn't have him. And they assembled the more better off guys and they went back up the hill. And they decided to carry him back down once they found him.

And he was conscious, but just barely at that. And we all get back down to the area where the creek was. And we all load into our track dump truck and manage to get ourselves down to safety. And I'm sure at this point, too, like you mentioned, your skins, like basically falling off. Were you, what was going through your mind in that moment? Were you terrified? Was there fear? Was it kind of just like from the adrenaline, were you just focused on just getting the safety?

In my mind, I'm thinking that. I'll never live the same life again if I survive this. And that there's a very high likelihood that once I pass out from this, I'm never waking back up again. And so with that, I'm just, I'm scared. Yeah. And I mean, not only am I scared because I'm burnt, I'm just, I'm terrified because I don't want, to pass away without all of my family and my girlfriend and my friends not knowing that I was thinking about them. Yeah.

So, of course, we get down to where our entrances to the wells and we finally get a call put out to authorities. And are you still a mile out? No. By this time, we're at the front of our wall. well site, which is a mile away from where all the burning wreckage is. Gotcha. Okay. So we're where emergency services can get to us.

Gotcha. Okay. And we're sitting there and we're waiting and we're splashing ourselves with bottled water now and just trying to stay cool. And I'm sure it was terrifying to see, like obviously you could look down and see yourself in your arm, but I'm sure seeing your other friend that was super burned. I'm sure that was probably so. scary too, because it's like a mirror, you know?

Yeah. And at the time, I didn't know it, but I was the worst off out of the group. Okay. And so I'm just sitting there trying to figure things out while we're waiting on emergency services to get there. And finally, they come and they quickly assess all of us. And they walk through and they just look at me and they're like, you're going with us. I am sure so many people can relate to this when it comes to losing weight. The most annoying and frustrating thing is feeling like you're making progress and then some time goes

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and stopping treatment may result in weight regain. Weight loss by hers is not available in all 50 states. Willgovi is the registered trademark of Novo Nordisk AS. To get started and learn more, including important safety information will go be clinical study information and restrictions visit for hers.com so they get me laid down on the stretcher and they load me up in the back and we're going down the road and he's like man i've i've never seen anything like this before and you're still conscious i'm still conscious and he's like i don't know how to help you i can't get an IV on you to give you anything to cut the pain. And I'm like, well, you got to do something, man. He's like, I can give you a bone tap. Do you know what a bone tap is? They take a drill and go straight through your

flesh, bone, and into your bone marrow, and then they inject the medication into you through your bone marrow. And where do they do that? Wherever is a viable spot at the time. And so he wants to give me one of my leg. And I look at him and I look at him. And I, just go, you're not giving me a bone tap. You're finding something else. So the next thing that he decides is to just start dumping saline bags on me. And I couldn't count how many saline bags we dumped. But all I know is as we're going down the road, you can hear the saline sloshing around in the back of this ambulance. And finally, we get ourselves to Marrieta Memorial, where they unload me out of the back. And once I see the doors to Marriott of a memorial, I don't know if

something clicked in my head, like, you're here, you're safe. But that's when I go lights out. Right. And at that point, I'm in their hands. Yeah. I have no control. or anything. And I didn't know it at the time, but most of my hair was gone, and I had very little viable skin, and they're rushing me to OSU. But I go unconscious for two and a half months.

Really? Yeah. You did not wake up at all in that time. No. But the only thing that I know from that time, which is what, family and friends have told me is that while I was unconscious, I would follow one specific person with my eyes. And that's Emma. Quite literally, anytime that they would say her name

or they would, I would hear her talking, my eyes closed or half open would follow her. the room. Yeah. Although I can't talk or do anything, my mind is still on her. Yeah. Trying to figure out where she is. Now, do you remember anything from those two and a half months? The only thing that I remember from those two and a half months is I had kind of like a, I don't

know what to call it, but I had a vision of my great-grandfather who's long since passed. and I remember like being jolted awake per se yeah and seeing him and he looks at me and he goes boy I don't know what you're doing up here but you don't belong and then he basically just like pushes me and tells me to go back and then I start remembering things again and it's so weird because you hear so many like experiences like that and until you experience your experience it yourself it's like whoa yeah this this is really real now and me and her both very religious in our own different ways but we both in full faith believe god is real. and he is the Lord.

Right. And you really start putting a lot more faith into something once you've had these type of experiences because you know that there was some sort of hand protecting you. Absolutely. And we can't thank him enough. Right. But, I mean, I spent a lot of time in the hospital. My entire stay at OSU Wexner and the Dodd Rehabilitation Hospital was 144 days before I was released.

And then I was having biweekly checkups as well as several days a week. I was going up for rehabilitation. So in the two and a half months, did they do any surgery? I'm assuming they did surgeries on you then. They did many surgeries. Okay. And did they tell you what some of those surgeries were? So a lot of those surgeries, which they were to put skin on me from other places, but also to, they also did what's called an escarotomy.

What's that? An escherotomy is not very pleasant. It's whenever your body is swelling up with fluid from the actual burn. I mean, you get a giant blister. Right. And they have to take and slice that and release the pressure. Because the pressure itself starts crushing you. Yeah.

So they just had to keep redoing that. So I still have scars in places where the escharotomies were. And I'm thankful that they did them. And I'm also thankful that the first day that I was at the hospital, they took two little incisions in my groin and sent those out to Boston. And once they got to Boston, they started getting to work making my skin into something that I could use later on down the road and grow it. That is crazy. They mixed my skin with mouse skin.

Wow. Grew it in a lab. It's called epistle. Okay. They still have my skin. And if anything was to ever happen to me again, they can start and reactivate that growth cycle. Uh-huh. And they can grow me more skin.

So that could be used as a skin graft, right? That's what it was. Okay. Gotcha. It was tiny little postage stamp size pieces that are $15,000 a piece. Oh, my gosh. I'm worth $10 million in skin and surgeries. That's crazy.

Yes. Oh, my gosh. Insane. Yeah. Okay, so during that time, so they sent that skin out and then they're basically producing more. And then obviously they're like changing your. bandages and all that stuff. I'm sure that is that daily? Is that multiple times a day? Daily. And I think in the beginning it was multiple times a day too. I'm not really sure.

I wasn't conscious. Do they have to put like, do you know if they do like creams and stuff or is it really just? They do multiple different types of things. There's kennelaw cream, there's Bassie Trason, there's multiple different types of bandages and bandage wraps. I mean, obviously. Honestly, thankfully in those couple months, probably that you were just out because I'm sure that pain is like no other. Yeah. I mean, they kept me under for quite a while. Gotcha. Okay.

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And the doctors were trying different methods to try and get rid of it. And they finally found something that would work. But it took them multiple attempts. And what was that infection again? We've been trying to get a hold of the doctors and figure that out. Nobody can tell us what the exact name of that is. It's some, so it's, to my understanding, it's a common bacteria, but the form that it had taken was rare in itself.

Well, I'm sure, too, because you just were full of open wounds. So it's just, like, probably amplified that. Oh, yeah. I mean, once you have so much your body exposed and you have, infection covering that much surface area, it just complicates things. How long did it take them to get that managed? I think that we had just got it managed like a couple weeks before I had been transferred to Dodd.

Okay. And I stayed in Dodd for 10 days, so it was right there at the end. Okay. That we had finally got it managed. And then they brought you. you, it was them that woke you back up, right? Yeah. Okay.

And when you, do you remember what your thoughts were when you first woke up? I thought that it wasn't real. I thought that I was surely dead. Okay. Once I kind of realized that, hey, I am alive. I'm in pain, but I'm still here and my family's still here with me. I was like, okay, maybe we got this. And then they started to kind of try to get me up and move me around.

And that was one of my first memories was them getting me up and moving me around. They wanted to get me up and sit me on the side of the bed. And after that much burn and staying still for that long, everything is very painful and everything is atrophied, very bad. Yeah. I had lost so much muscle and just strength from that time that it was completely unreal. They get me up on the side of the bed and get me to where I can kind of look out of a window. And at the time, I'm kind of like half folded over, like not really sitting up at a 90 degree angle, kind of like halfway. and people are holding on to my back, that way I don't fall.

And it hurts. I can't move myself at all at this point. So then they get me turned back around, lay me down and whatnot, and a couple more days go by, and we start doing this regularly until they start asking me to do it myself. And I get to the point where I can do it myself, but it's difficult. It takes a lot of just sheer effort to push down and get myself to lean up and move around. But I slowly got it until they got me to stand up and whatnot. And my family had to have a come to Jesus meeting with me because I quite literally told them that I was not getting up and walking again.

Yeah. They could just push me around. or wailed me around for the rest of my life. And they were like, no. Right. And so I got yelled at and told, if you don't do this, this is all for nothing. Yeah. And what were we having hoped for?

And, like, you know, of course they don't mean all that. They're just, they want you to do better. Right, trying to push you. And so I finally get up. And we start out with just taking a couple steps here and there, and then we walk around the bed. Then we get to the point of walking to the doorway and back, and walking out to the nurses station,

and walking to the end of the ICU hallway and back, and then walking to the other ICU block and back, and then doing a lap around the entire thing, him back until at this point I'm doing laps around this place and it feels great again because I can move but the entire time I still had a problem which was I still had a lot of open wounds and bandage changes are extremely excruciating. It's crazy because I don't know if you know like when you have a burn that bad, you have to take and scrub away the dead skin. And sometimes in some places that is all very dead and doesn't really hurt.

And sometimes you get to places like I had healed. my back completely in myself. They didn't have to do skin grafts on the center of my back. The sides, they did a little bit of skin grafting. But the center of my back, I healed. And because I healed all that, I can feel everything on my back. And so they would flip me over on my side, and they would take and start peeling that stuff. off my back. And mind you, I'm on a lot of dilaudid and ketamine and other very sedative drugs.

And it's not good when they start peeling that stuff off because I scream bloody murder. Yeah. And of course, sometimes my family is outside listening to the doctors talk, and they can hear me screaming bloody murder, and everybody in the ICU can see you or can hear you. And that's with the door shut and curtains pulled back. And they just have to do that, and then they have to take and scrub and knock all the dead skin cells off

until it bleeds and looks healthy. And then they can put new ointment on it. And that's every day. Every single day. And the bad part is that sometimes it's at the exact same time and sometimes it doesn't happen until really late in the day. And if you haven't had your bandage changes for a long time, things start to get really uncomfortable.

And I still have to do bandage changes. on this arm and at the bottom of my neck. Okay. Because that stuff, it's still healing. Right. This arm, it's been open since I left the hospital. It's never been fully healed. But my neck, this is all fresh.

Right. And good and heal for the most part. So during these couple months that you're, or afterwards, when you're doing your laps and you're walking, how was your, or obviously you're making progress in that way, but how was your mental health? My mental health, it went from being okay to not bad. And then we started to get home. And once I realized I was home again and I could kind of take a step back and I'm not in any mortal danger of getting a serious infection anymore. that's when everything really hit it it hit home hard once i got home i started having night terrors

i started was it about the fire specifically i started having night terrors i had PTSD i had flashbacks of just being there and i also would have moments of where i just would get really hot yeah and felt like I was on fire again. And you don't really know what to think when you get to such a low point in your life. And that's something that I'm trying to help my followers with is once you get to these kind of points, you don't want to let your mind eat you up with the accident. You want to, you want to use those thoughts and those memories and say you are a burn survivor and you have PTSD and you're getting hot and you're also thinking about the fire take and swap out that thought of being hot or that feeling of being hot and use a thought of sitting next to something cozy

Yeah. Or sitting with someone that you know is just kind of your warmth. Mm-hmm. Or swapping out your thoughts of seeing the fire with something that you know you love. Okay. So I moved into a new house, and if you've ever done that, you know the air feels a little off at first. Between new paint, new furniture, funky old vents. Who even knows what you're actually reading?

everything in. That's why I got Jasper and I am absolutely obsessed. It's a medical grade air scrubber. So it doesn't just filter the air. It scrubs it completely clean. Smoke, mold spores, VOCs, chemical fumes, all of it completely gone. I feel so much calmer knowing the air in my home is actually clean. Like I'm not fighting invisible stuff while trying to take care of myself and even all of my animals. Jasper gave me a code for $200 off. Use Insane at Jasper. That's insane for 200 bucks off. We talk a lot about taking care of our minds on this show, but the air we breathe matters just as much.

The 26 Chevrolet Tracks is the stylish SUV for those on the move. And with the standard Chevy safety assist package, you have the backup to handle every turn with confidence. The 2026 tracks, start your build at Chevrolet.ca. It's very much so how you carry your mind. through these kind of things that gets you through them. Did you have to go to therapy to get to that point? I did.

My wife works at a mental health facility, and she finally encouraged me to go because she couldn't watch me go through it anymore. Yeah. And they really helped me, and they helped me find coping skills, and then I took on those coping skills, and I learned ways to cope with it myself on top of those.

So if something that they gave me wasn't working, I kind of rearranged what they said and how they said to do it to make it to where it suited me best. And it's something that if somebody else is going through this or has something similar like they have PTSD or they just don't know how to hand. handle something. And they're stressed out. Just take and rearrange those thoughts and turn it into something that's comforting, but still resembles roughly what you're worried about. That way you can have a comforting aspect to cope with in your mind on top of your stress.

Right. Because it's your mindset that really does it. It's not the therapy sessions because if the therapy sessions are working, great. But if they're not, you have to take the next step. They can't take that step for you. Were you at this time, were you still talking to your friend that also suffered the really bad burns? So I hadn't talked to him for a while because I was still working through a lot of my stuff. And I needed to know that I was in a good place to help myself and start helping others before I could step back and start helping him as well.

Because if I couldn't help myself or help others, how am I going to help my friend who was also in that moment? Yeah. Yeah, I wasn't sure if maybe like you guys. guys leaned on each other during that time of like healing, you know, both physically and mentally just to kind of sense you both could relate. We would talk in the hospital, but once we got home and things started to get more real for both of us, we both, I stepped away. He tried contacting me and I feel very bad about not talking to him, but I needed to know that I could help myself. Of course, yeah.

And help others and then I could help him because... Who am I if I can't do all that? Right. I mean, it takes a lot mentally to help someone who is in the same shoes as you in the same moment. And then during this time, so you're home and obviously you can't work or do anything like that. So did you decide you weren't going to do that job anymore at all? So the only thing that I have to do with that job right now is I have workers' comp from the company that I was in that accident with. And I don't want to be affiliated with them at all.

But the workers' comp is saving me. Right. Because if not, I would have to pay back $10 million worth of surgeries. and care and all kinds of stuff. So it's very helpful that Workers' Comp is taking care of me, although we don't exactly agree 100% on everything the Workers' Comp says. They're still a lifesaver. And the company, I don't know how they managed to get away

with the little bit of OSHA violations that they did. But if they were able to do that, then great. And you do you. But I'm stepping away from the oil field. And then as far as that goes with your career and your future, do you have any goals in mind or any ideas of what you want to do next? So right now I'm talking with many different OSU people to, to maybe start doing public speaking up there to actual burn survivors from a firsthand perspective

and helping them through their problems as well as I'm really looking to get into public speaking in general and go around and do safety classes and stuff like that. Maybe people can be a little safer if they see someone who's actually had the accident happen, not just somebody telling them that the accident could happen. Right. And in general, with your healing journey, both physically and mentally, how long did it take you to kind of get to a place where you felt like you were on the up and up with everything? So it really didn't feel like I was on the up and up until like, maybe

February, March and of course this happened on August 25th of last year so that's quite a while to feel like you're really far on the downward slope and

at that point in February I proposed to Emma and just a month later February 28th I proposed to her on March 28th, we got married because I was going to have surgery starting again. And we didn't want to take any chances of not being together.

Yeah. When all this started again. And we were slowly building our way back up. We finally rented a house together in the beginning of May. And we started putting together our little family. And we've got our three cats. and our little house in the woods. I love it.

While we're renting and we're looking to buy something, it's something. I mean, we're making the best of a bad situation. And then with sharing your story, when did you start speaking out about it on social media? So I just started speaking out about it first on TikTok. at the end of August, and I'm still continuing to do it. And I started posting it on Facebook as well about a week into September. And then what has the response been on social media? Have you gotten a lot of messages from other burn victims?

I have had so many messages from other burn victims. victims and other people who just say that if I was to become a public speaker, that I would do great things. And it really makes me feel amazing because that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to make people feel amazing. Well, I think, too, you know, it's extremely inspiring because, you know, you went through this, basically this near-death experience. It's terrifying. I mean, you're getting basically basically burned alive, you know, and you're seeing your body in ways that I feel like, you know, 90% if not more, people will never see their body in that condition and it's terrifying.

You know, and I feel like there's no amount of healing and therapy that will ever take those memories away. It's like you can obviously improve and get better and get to a place where you are able to spread awareness and share your story, but that's still terrifying to think about and look back on. And you know what it feels like. feel like I might not wake up ever again. And the funniest thing is that once this accident happened, they told me, or they told my family, I should say, that I would never remember any of this in the hospital. Like, I wouldn't remember the accident.

I just would forget it all. And probably the beginning of the day as well. Okay. So I moved into a new house, and if you've ever done that, you know the air feels a little off at first. Between new paint, new furniture, funky old vents, who even knows what you're actually breathing in? That's why I got Jasper and I am absolutely obsessed. It's a medical grade air scrubber. So it doesn't just filter the air.

It scrubs it completely clean. Smoke, mold spores, VOCs, chemical fumes, all of it completely gone. I feel so much calmer knowing the air in my home is actually clean. like I'm not fighting invisible stuff while trying to take care of myself and even all of my animals. Jasper gave me a code for $200 off. Use insane at jasper.com. That's insane for $200 bucks off. We talk a lot about taking care of our minds on this show, but the air we breathe matters just as much. If you want a $3,000 a month payday for life, what would you feel free to do?

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It would probably all just be a blur, and I'd never know what happened, and they would have to tell me about it. But I remember everything. Right. Vividly. And when I tell you the story, I can remember doing all the actions of that day and how it played out. I mean, there's many details that you can't really talk to detail.

But it's funny because as much as it makes your family hope that they don't have to know the full details. or they don't want to hear the full details, it's good for them to know exactly what happened. That way, there is that form of closure. Yeah. And you're here and you're doing amazing. Yeah. So what, as far as surgeries go, when is your next one coming up?

My next surgery won't be for, I think it's going to be like another. month or so. Maybe more. We haven't scheduled it yet, but I do know that they're really planning on doing a Z-plasty on both my armpits. And then we're also going to probably do another flap and take skin from somewhere else on my body and put it in the crease of this arm. Yeah. And hopefully try to get this to finally close. So that's still open wounds on that arm. So there are two open wounds on this arm. There's one on my wrist. There's one in the crease of my arm right here about.

Epic. And this is epistle that didn't take in this area. Gotcha. Epistle is still very experimental. Gotcha. So while it was a pro in others, like this leg is also fully epicell, and it took amazing. and I don't have open wounds. Okay.

This part up here, it didn't take so well. And we think that that's because in the hospital, one of my heat lamps wasn't working properly to dry out the epistle and get it to stay. And that's okay because at least them learning from me can help somebody else later on. And how with your, the neck graft, and everything like that, how was that healing-wise?

Was that really painful? So the funniest thing is I never felt any of this. Okay. This is completely numb. Gotcha. You could pinch, punch, nothing, do whatever. And from this center line down my leg, down to like the outside all over, can't feel any of it.

Right up in here, there's a nerve that connects and controls all of the side of your leg like that. And whenever we had this surgery done, that nerve was damaged. And it may come back. It may not come back. But I'm not concerned because this has given me range of motion while still keeping strength and functionality in kind of a balance. Right. And then on this arm, that's from like the lasers, right? So the top part where it's all dry and all these little black marks

are still scabs and dry skin from the laser itself. And then how many more, is the lasers, is that something that you're going to continuously do to just help heal? They say for a full treatment of lasers after a serious burn, it is 36,000. Six treatments, six weeks apart in six different sessions, I think, is what it is. Gotcha. So every six weeks from here on out, I get another laser treatment. And so that comes out to be something close to like four, four and a half years. Now, are they doing that on just your arms and your body?

in your face as well. So they did my cheek and they did this cheek and a little bit of my nose. Okay. And then they go mostly the front of me. Gotcha. They go all the way down the front of this arm and front of my chest. I mean, they do quite a bit of me because I have a lot of burns. I mean, I'm burnt from right up here on this, so I clear down to my ankle.

And I have an issue with this leg where if I keep it down for too awfully long, like say an entire day, it gets very, very swollen because the burn around my ankle goes all the way around and it's called a circumferential burn. And it's basically like always wearing a really tight sock around your foot. So fluid and everything kind of gathers at your feet. and it makes this foot to wear, I have to wear a size up shoe on both of my feet just because one foot's really fat. Right. Which, that's all right. I like having my fat foot. I can kind of be all right with it.

Yeah. And everybody likes joking about my fat foot with me. And the best part about all this is we have a really good sense of humor. Good. Like, as I've been getting more used to filming videos and stuff, my sense of humor has been slowly coming out more and more in my videos. So if you go back and watch, I was very shy and timid in the first videos. And now I come in and I just kind of jump into the camera and I'm popping up all over the

house. And I just like doing the random cuts and edits. and I'm getting comfortable with it. And it's fun. And that's important too, because I think that's kind of what I was going to ask you next is because I know that we were talking about what happened at the hotel. And my question with that is,

and I think this would be good for anybody else that's going through anything physical, is that did you find that challenging for you at all, just having people, I guess, because like we said, people can be cruel and kind of not have that awareness when it comes to saying certain comments or looking a certain way of people,

did you find that challenging at all for you? The only thing that I found challenging was when, because I'm very protective, whenever somebody talks poorly on my wife, but whenever somebody makes fun of how I look or something like that, I kind of lean into it. Okay. A lot of people have been calling me Deadpool or just Freddie Kruger or something like that.

And I've leaned into it. I've actually went and got a Deadpool mask and I'm going to start doing a little bit of stuff with my Deadpool mask. And maybe I'm going to get Freddie Kruger and who knows what else. Right. I think honestly it's better to lean into those hurtful comments than to shy away from them because you'll reach more people leaning into it than fighting it. I mean, people are going to care when you are going to say something that you don't like that you get those comments.

But more people are going to pay attention. and listen and get awareness if you lean into that and kind of play both sides of the table. And I think, too, anybody watching you that, you know, might be having thoughts of just feeling, you know, ashamed or embarrassed or insecure, whatever it might be, you know, I think seeing your, how you're reacting and your personality and leaning into that and kind of gaining that confidence over time, I think that that would obviously naturally help a lot of people, you know, feel more confident and feel like, okay, he's acting this way. Like, I should lean into it too and not, you know, kind of tap into the confidence aspect of it all and not allow what anybody

says or even just how we look, you know, change how we feel about ourselves. Because I think especially in a world where, you know, social media is so common and we're, it's so easy to make these videos of ourselves and whatever else. It can be very easy to be very easy to be a affected naturally. You know, at the end of the day, we are human. So people's words hurt, people's comments hurt. And, you know, when you go from, naturally, when you go from, you know, having no burns at all to now obviously looking different and your whole life changes, I think that can be really challenging on its own. Okay. So I moved into a new house and if you've ever done that, you know the air feels a little off at first. Between new paint, new furniture, funky old vents, who even knows what

you're actually breathing in. That's why I got Jasper and I am absolutely obsessed. It's a medical grade air scrubber. So it doesn't just filter the air. It scrubs it completely clean. Smoke, mold spores, VOCs, chemical fumes, all of it completely gone. I feel so much calmer knowing that and my home is actually clean. Like I'm not fighting invisible stuff while trying to take care of myself and even all of my animals. Jasper gave me a code for $200 off. Use insane. at jasper.com. That's insane for 200 bucks off. We talk a lot about taking care of our minds on this show,

but the air we breathe matters just as much. Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com. But to, like you said, adapt this new life and not let it, you know, be an identifier for you and control you.

I think that's really, really powerful. And like I said, I think the most powerful thing about that, not only for yourself, but for others, is to help others realize, like, I don't have to let this control me, you know, and define me. I've always had a very playful and fun attitude. And this is just kind of added to it. I mean, I have ADHD and I'm kind of wild. spunky in my own ways.

And I think once I fully get into my comfortability with talking about this and being on camera, I think that it's just going to be really fun because I'll be able to really, really joke and help people because a lot of people are just self-conscious with looking normal. Yep. And once you get like this, a lot of people won't show their face. Right. They'll stay inside and they'll have other people do stuff for them. And I go out and I try to show people that we go out and we do normal thing.

Right. As well as I put it all on full display. I'll take my shirt off and I'll hang out in front of the camera and I'll talk and I'll show them and let them experience it. Well, I think it's incredible, too. Like I mentioned, you know, that this, it's only been about a year, you know. And the fact that you are in such an amazing, healthy spot is incredible. I think that on its own is that shows, to me, that shows your determination and your, you know, your willpower and everything else. So I think that that in its own is very, very incredible for people to see.

Because that's not easy. Like you said, there's so many people that even like how you, which you can relate to, like you had those moments where you were like, no, you can push me around. I don't want to get up. You know, and I think even sharing that aspect of things, so many people, you know, that have had something like this happened to them or any type of tragic accident of any sort that they just want to give up, it shows them why it's so important not to, you know, because there can be that light at the end of the tunnel. And it's something that obviously it's such a traumatic and terrifying experience. But it's one that I think if you have that effort and that determination that you're willing to put in, you know,

like you are the example of that outcome. Yeah. I mean, it really does just take time and concentration. Because once you get into a really dark place and you're focusing on all of your bad, you can kind of take a step back and you can rework things. You just, you have to be open to change. And a lot of us aren't open to change.

And it's so easy to get stuck in those dark places. And I think it is incredible, obviously, that, you know, you had Emma, you guys have each other. And it helps to have that person, you know, that's support. And I think that's incredible. That's really, really helpful to have to. And obviously, your family and everything else. And for anybody that is being taken care of by just their family, not their loved one, like, say it's your parents taking care of you and not your wife who's going to push you

a lot harder. If it's your family, they don't want to see you in pain. They just want to help you. And it's really important to make your family and your friends or whoever is helping take care of you, push you as far past that limit. Yeah, because you're going to have days that you're not going to want to. Like, I used to not want to get up and go make a plate because it just, I was sore. I hurt. And I didn't want to get up.

And Emma would come up to me and she would go, no, get your butt up. You're going in the kitchen. You're making a plate. And then you can sit down and relax. And I'm like, okay. And so I go and do it. And slowly over time, it just starts to become normal again. Yeah.

Because once you denormalize something for so long, it's so hard to get back into a rhythm. Absolutely. It takes consistency and focus to really want to get back and to also have your family get you back to something like that. You can't do it one day and not the next because then you're just... Yeah, you just stay consistent with it. You force yourself some days. You're breaking a habit. that is easy if you just really take the time.

Do you still have any of the nightmares happen? I have medications that I take now to help me sleep. And that's all right. Absolutely. Yeah. We have so many different medications and so many different drugs that we can take to help with a lot of different things. And why not use them?

I completely agree. Don't take advantage of them, but use them. And there's a lot of people who ask me, like, how do I manage my pain? To be honest, if you keep moving and you keep doing things, you really don't have to worry about the pain. If you can trick your mind that you don't need that stuff, then you won't. And I think just keeping moving and keeping moving,

and keeping going probably really helps the body just heal, I'm sure. I mean, I have little to no pain throughout my daily life. It's amazing. I mean, the only thing that I have that affects me is really nerve pain. Okay. And at that, it's minimal. I can tell that I haven't taken my meds today yet, but normally I take them around one or so, and that's fine.

Does it hurt when you guys change this bandage? No, actually. This is all completely numb in here. Okay, gotcha. As well as everything below here. Okay. But you get into like places like this and I can feel touch just solely because I can feel it on my finger. Okay.

And it's not burnt, but you can just feel pressure underneath of there. Yeah. If someone else was to touch me very lightly, I wouldn't know that I'd. I was touching myself. So you're pretty numb? Pretty numb. But there's some places that are really burnt that I can still feel pretty good. And then there's others that you could be kind of pushing and playing with my skin or whatever

and it, I never would know. Now if they take a skin graft from, let's say like another part of your other leg and they put that on the areas of this arm that I'm not healed yet, do you think that would probably take right because it would be different than i believe it would take i mean because that would be different than what they were making in that lab right epistle uh the reason that it was being put under heat lamps is because it's very they have to keep it like a petri dish and keep it very wet got healthy so they needed it to dry out and stick and take to the skin and one of my lamps wasn't working properly and it kept shutting off in the hospital.

So that's why we think it didn't take, which we're not really mad about. It's just, it's frustrating. Right. But it took on that whole leg, other leg, right? It took this whole leg. And so while it probably would have worked if everything would have went right, not everything in life is perfect. Yeah, you'll figure something else out.

Yeah. And I have a great care team, and they're going to take care of this arm. I mean, it's almost fully straight. Okay. And that's what we're going for is once we go in and do the surgery, they're going to release this a little bit, and they're going to make it to where I can straighten this arm completely. Okay. Amazing.

And there's a lot of different things that I can't fully do yet that I'll be able to do again. Okay, so I moved into a new house, and if you've ever done that, you know the air feels a little off at first, between new paint, new furniture, funky old vents, who even knows what you're actually breathing in? That's why I got Jasper and I am absolutely obsessed. It's a medical grade air scrubber.

So it doesn't just filter the air, it scrubs it completely clean. Smoke, mold spores, VOCs, chemical fumes, all of it completely gone. I feel so much calmer knowing the air in my home is actually clean. Like I'm not fighting invisible stuff while trying to take care of myself and even all of my animals. and even all of my animals. Jasper gave me a code for $200 off. Use insane at jasper.com. That's insane for 200 bucks off.

We talk a lot about taking care of our minds on this show, but the air we breathe matters just as much. One thing is once I get my Z-plasty, it'll be a lot easier to go get some food at a drive-thru or something because I can't really reach out my car window. It's like the little things that you don't even think of until you're in those moments. But then there's major things. that it affects me with throughout my daily life.

Because of having these in my armpits, I can't exactly clean myself properly. Yeah. You can't reach around your back like you normally would. Right. So I have to have help in some way or another. And I actually put in a bidet at the house to help me with being at home alone. Yeah.

And it's just finding. ways to adapt. That's something that it takes a lot of once you have a serious injury or an accident. It puts life into a completely different perspective, I think too, you know, which I think in a way is incredible because it makes you realize how grateful you can be for being, you know, a healthy human being that can do a simple thing like walk or like you said, reach through, a drive-through, window, things that you go about every day and don't even think about or consider. And, I mean, prior to this, I was, oil field made me a very strong and kind of bullheaded person. I was going to work every day throwing 300 pound joints of pipe, 40 joints at a time up to the deck of our rig.

And whenever we would pull out a whole well, you would take those same joints of pipe and throw them back. And sometimes we would do that three, four times a day. So I was strong, but I was also weak in a sense because I hadn't had enough experience with pain or struggle or stuff like that to really have a strong mind. And once you experience having a strong mind, you can really take on a whole new light in your everyday life. Absolutely. You could be the biggest, toughest person. But once you start working on your mind, that's where real improvement starts. I agree.

So what is next for you? Have you planned any public speaking stuff yet? So I have a event coming up with OSU. I'm going to be talking to the Midwest Byrne conference. So all of the states in the Midwest are going to come together and send their best and brightest for burn. And they're going to have a conference at OSU in one of their buildings. and I'm going to get up in front of them and I'm going to tell them like,

hey, this is my experience with some of these things that could be done better and could help ease the pain of someone who's in a serious burn situation, as well as I'm being talked to by several different people from OSU about different ways that I can get into their public speaking programs and both talk to doctors as well as their medical staff and their people have been in these injuries. And I'm going to continue on and follow with that and turn it into an actual public speaking career as well as see where it takes me.

I don't know where I can go with this, but I want to go as far as I can with it. You should, absolutely, and continue to share your story online. My doctors tell me that I'll never be able to work a regular job again in my life. Because one thing you don't realize until you're burnt is none of the skin can sweat anymore. So it's very hard for us to regulate temperature. Yeah. So once we get hot and sweaty, we only have a couple places that we're, can sweat. I can only sweat from my armpits, my groin in this leg, and sometimes when I'm really hot,

my hair. But that's it. You can't sweat from your skin like you usually would. So we get hot. We have to go sit down and relax for quite a while, and then we can kind of get back into it later. but it's something that it takes time to adapt to. And I'm still learning and I'm new to it. There's many people who are way farther out in their accents that can do what they want because they've adapted. But there's a lot of people like Corey Halstead. He's a little over two years out.

And he lives in Arizona. And it's very hot. Yeah. But it's something that it just, you learn. Yeah, with time, you figure out. You learn with time. You take baby steps. And when push comes to shove, there's baby steps slowly build up to big things.

And you know what you're doing. And I'm learning what I'm doing. Well, I think you do such a great job, truly, at telling your story and articulating, you know, what happened and the aftermath and everything in between. Truly, I think you, I think you're meant to share your story in whatever format and whatever way you can. I'm going to try to do every way that I can. I mean, I'm trying to work on getting a computer right now to hopefully put some videos to, more professionally and do YouTube as well as my social media platforms. So I'm going to try expanding a little bit.

But the hard part is that once I start putting these things together, I can't earn anything off of them because of workers' comp. If I was to make anything, they would take all of my benefits. That's crazy. Yeah. Like I've been doing TikTok lives and stuff and people send me stuff on TikTok Live, but I can't cash any of that out. Right. Because it's... So even if you got a different job that was like something like a job that you just went, applied, got, you wouldn't be able to keep that money?

No. They would take my benefits. That's cool. And she works, but I can't work. And I still, we get bi-weekly payment from workers' comp. But they won't let you make anything on top of that. They won't let me make anything on top of it. Jeez. They won't even let you.

Say I wanted to sell something on Facebook. If they found out that I was making money on Facebook, they would take my stuff. Oh, that's crazy. Yeah. Even if it's non-taxable income. Right. They always get you somehow, don't they? Oh, my gosh.

in the butt. Yeah. So currently me and Tristan Rader, one of our state representatives, are working together to change that. Yeah, absolutely. Right, as if you haven't already had it hard enough. And he's also had a oil and gas company come into Ohio that is wanting to drill in the same forest that this happened in.

And me and him are working together to shut that down. Absolutely. And I'm trying to convince. my friend who was also in the accident to speak with me. Yeah, right, and it's not worth it. Because, I mean, you're never going to stop big oil. Right. But you can warn.

Yep. And if they have the knowledge that, hey, this has never been touched, this is all very, very fresh and high pressure. Yeah. Maybe you can save someone. Yep. But you can't save them all. That's if you could.

Right. It would be a different world. It would. Well, you're incredible. And I love how you share your story truly. And like I said, I think in whatever way you can in whatever way inspires people and helps you heal mentally and keeps you going along, I think you should. And I think, like I said, truly the way that you articulate everything. is incredible and you should be so proud of yourself.

Like I said, I can't believe that it's only been, you know, such a short amount of time and you're already doing what you're doing. You should be very, very proud of yourself. It's taken some time to get used to, but we're, I feel like I'm really, I'm really just stepping into it nicely. Hey guys, don't forget about We're All Insane Plus, where you can get access to bonus episodes and early releases on Fridays to every Sunday's episode.

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