Ex-Husky Pahukoa pays it forward

Published 9:46 pm Monday, November 7, 2011

During a weekend that celebrated his team’s national championship, former University of Washington football player Shane Pahukoa took time to revisit another less joyous part of his past.

Pahukoa, the starting free safety on Washington’s undefeated and top-ranked 1991 team, flew to Seattle on Thursday from his Los Angeles-area home for the 20th-anniversary event, which included introduction of the team to a cheering crowd at Saturday’s Washington-Oregon game in Husky Stadium.

But the day before, Pahukoa was at Seattle’s UW Regional Burn Center at Harborview, visiting with young patients in the same eighth-floor unit where he underwent surgeries and rehabilitative treatments after a horrific childhood accident more than three decades ago.

“It was kind of a weird moment for me,” said the 40-year-old Pahukoa, a 1989 graduate of Marysville-Pilchuck High School. “I don’t have any good memories about going up there.”

In July of 1978, while visiting relatives in Vancouver, Wash., with his family, Pahukoa — he was 7 at the time — suffered third-degree burns on his neck and face when a cousin playfully tossed gasoline on a campfire, only to have the gas splash onto Pahukoa and burst into flames.

With near-fatal injuries, he spent the rest of the summer in a Portland, Ore., hospital, and then was in and out of Harborview over the next six years. Although Pahukoa recovered and grew to be an outstanding football player — after leaving Washington, he played parts of three seasons in the NFL — nothing in his lifetime surpasses the memories of his accident and its agonizing aftermath, including the harsh understanding that he would be left with conspicuous scars on his neck and face.

“I played football with broken hands and broken ribs, but that’s nothing,” Pahukoa said. “There’s no pain or anything else I’ll ever deal with again like what I experienced when I was 7. Or what I’ve had to live with for the last 30 years.”

Among injuries there is nothing so cruel as a severe burn. The pain recedes over time, but scars caused by damage to the underlying tissue remain. They are indelible and often grotesque, and for anyone — and particularly a child — the emotional trauma is profound.

After his accident, “I didn’t want to go anywhere,” Pahukoa said. He wore a protective mask for the next year, “and at school I’d eat in a classroom by myself because I had to take the mask off to eat and I didn’t want the other kids to see me. I was afraid of what they’d say. … I was ashamed of how I looked. It was like I was a beast. Like I was hideous.”

And of course the other children knew, mask or not. “Scarface,” he said, recalling the childhood taunts. “That was the No. 1 name I heard.”

Athletic success gave him confidence, but never completely took away his self-consciousness. He began wearing high-collar shirts and jackets, and on the football field he rarely removed his helmet. But he could never cover the scars completely, so he grew accustomed to the thoughtless stares and occasionally unkind comments of passersby.

The remedy, he found, was his own attitude.

“You always have to be positive,” he said. “If someone stares at you, you can ask them if they have any questions, which I’ve learned to do. … Maybe I’m not the most handsome guy anymore, but your life doesn’t have to stop just because you’ve been burned. You still have to be proud of who you are.”

According to surgeon and Burn Center director Dr. Nicole Gibran, roughly one-third of the center’s admitted patients — there were 950 in 2010 — are children. And virtually all burn victims of every age will need help adjusting to a life after burns.

“The emotional toll of an injury like a burn, not just on the patient, but also on the patient’s family, is enormous,” she said, which is why the burn center employs a full-time staff psychologist.

“We are trying to change the way people think about burns from being an acute event that you can get over quickly to being a chronic disease,” Gibran said. “Because many of the stigma and other issues that our patients have are still present 5-10 years after their injury. … Patients really need some sort of reassurance that they can return to their pre-injury life and be able to succeed, especially when they have a large burn.”

Pahukoa understands this, and it’s why he has such a heart of compassion for burn victims. It’s also why he responded at once when asked to join a fund-raising effort for Harborview’s Burn Center, which included his Friday visit.

“I just felt this was something I needed to do,” he said. “I know what those kids are going through because it’s what happened to me when I was a child. So I know their feelings and how vulnerable they are at that age. If there’s an expert about this — about the physical part of it, about the emotional part of it — it’s me.

“For some of these kids, it’s going to be hard for them. It’s going to be a long road and a tough road. But if they can look at me and find out the things I was able to do (in football) after my burns, maybe it’ll give them a little more hope.

“I have the burns, so I’ve been in their shoes. I know what they’ll be going through every day of their lives with the therapy and the name calling. So if I can just help one child who’s been burned, it’ll mean the world to me.”

Donations for Play2Heal

Shane Pahukoa’s visit to Seattle’s UW Regional Burn Center at Harborview on Friday was part of a fund-raising effort to build a large playroom for young burn victims and their families at the downtown hospital.

The Play2Heal project was started by another ex-UW football player, Cam Cleeland, and his wife Mindy, whose young son Treynor spent 16 days at Harborview in 2010 with severe friction burns suffered in a treadmill accident. The idea is that playtime and movement are important parts of the recovery process for young burn victims.

To make contributions to the new playroom, go to www.supportuwmedicine.org/play2heal.

Catching up with Shane Pahukoa

After finishing his UW career in 1992, Shane Pahukoa signed as a free agent with the NFL’s New Orleans Saints. He spent one season on the team’s practice squad, another season on injured reserve after a knee injury, and then played 15 games in 1995, including three starts.

But after another knee injury in the last game of 1995, he retired from football. Returning to Marysville with his wife, Kendra (Marysville-Pilchuck High School, class of 1991), and young daughter, Keala, the first of three children, he considered a career in law enforcement.

Instead, Pahukoa and his family moved to the Los Angeles area, where he and his wife went to work in a furniture business started by her brother. Today Pahukoa designs and manufactures “high-end furniture” that has appeared in magazines, on sets for movies and television programs, and for purchase by celebrities including singer/actress Madonna and actor Laurence Fishburne.

The Pahukoas live today in Sherman Oaks, Calif. The family includes daughter Keala, 17; son Kanoe, 13; and daughter Maile, 11.