BURN VICTIM REFLECTS ON ORDEAL; TEEN RETURNS TO HART HIGH, HOPES TO HELP OTHER SURVIVORS.

Byline: Patricia Farrell Aidem Daily News Staff Writer

His moves now are slow and stiff and Chris James still has trouble standing up straight, but from this weakened body has emerged a strong spirit.

His handsome teen-age face is marred by burns, and he wears a clear plastic hockey-style mask to help heal his new skin - a mask that conceals expression as he cracks one-liners about life since the accident.

Just 10 weeks ago, the day before Thanksgiving, 17-year-old Chris was enveloped in invisible flame on the football field at Hart High School in Newhall. A physics class experiment went terribly wrong, and burns ravaged half his body - his face, his arms, his torso.

This week, after months of hospitalization, countless surgeries and daily therapy, Chris returned to school.

It was tough to go back to the classroom, Chris said in an interview Tuesday at his Stevenson Ranch home. He was nervous that he wouldn't have the endurance to make it through the day, and worried about his appearance.

``I didn't want everyone looking at me,'' he said.

The experience - and the publicity - have left him with a desire to help other burn victims survive the physical, emotional and mental toll.

``I can use it to educate people about how burn survivors feel, like about what you go through, how you deal with it,'' Chris said. ``I went in and talked to this guy who had burns; I took off my mask and I said, See? It isn't so bad, and I was a lot worse than you.''

There have been times when Chris feels sorry for himself, and he tries his best to deal with the anger. He remembers asking ``Why me?'' but he never remembers giving up. Recovery is slow, and his activity is limited because sunlight will damage his new skin.

``It's hard to feel progress. It's slow, and I feel like crap every day,'' he said. ``But I want to get out and play soccer.''

He said he bears no ill will toward his physics teacher, who took the class out on the field to try an experiment in velocity. Using tubes crafted of juice cans, the students poured methanol into the makeshift ``cannon'' in hopes of shooting a tennis ball wedged into the other end.

What followed nearly killed Chris, while making heroes of his close friend Jesse Honea, a group of paramedics who helped him breathe through his seared and swelling windpipe, the team of surgeons and nurses at the Grossman Burn Center at Sherman Oaks Hospital, and Chris himself.

``I remember I was lying there,'' Chris said. ``Jesse took his jacket off and beat me with it. I thought, Gosh, I must be on fire. I heard everyone screaming everywhere. It was like a ball of fire.

``He saved my life. He's a good friend. He's a hero.''

Dr. A. Richard Grossman, who headed the team that worked on Chris, credited the six county Fire Department paramedics who raced to Hart High to a call of an explosion near the football field. Chris had inhaled the burning methanol used in the experiment and couldn't breathe. Paramedic Frank Garcia administered an asthma drug to help him breathe. A short time later, a tube was inserted that saved his life, the doctor said.

``He looked so helpless and in pain and he's a young kid,'' said Garcia, who has three sons, 17-year-old twins and a 19-year-old. ``You relate it to your own kids - you move fast to help him, but all the time it's in the back of your mind: What if this were my kid?''

Chris was taken by helicopter in a seven-minute trip to the Grossman Burn Center where surgeons worked swiftly and in concert to treat his burns. Six surgeons worked together to remove charred skin, replacing it with cadaver skin and assessing injuries to his vocal cords.

``We treated him aggressively. We pulled out all the stops,'' Grossman said. ``With the amount of burn damage to his body, his lungs, that first weekend, with hard work and with Hail Marys and Our Fathers, he got through it.''

A feeding tube was inserted into Chris' stomach to bypass his burned throat. The tube is gone now, but that and the skin grafts on his stomach likely are the reasons Chris has trouble standing straight, Grossman said.

Hospitalized until the week after Christmas, Chris teased death a few times, said his mother, Carolyn James. His blood pressure spiked, his heart rate raced.

The boy's mother credits God for her son's survival and likelihood of complete recovery.

``Really, God deserves the credit for why he is sitting here, why he looks so good,'' Carolyn James said.

In June, Chris will graduate with his class. In the summer, he plans to begin working out in a gym where his new skin will be safe from the sun. In the fall, he'll go to college.

In fact, the day before the accident, Chris was accepted into the radio-television-film program at California State University, Northridge, where he also has been asked to play on the men's soccer team.

``He's got to be one determined kid to go through that to make that kind of recovery,'' Garcia said.

Chris doesn't understand why he's been made out to be the hero, why the clock keeps ticking on his 15 minutes of fame.

It's simple, Grossman said. It's because he made it.

``The answer is that every parent is scared to death that this could have happened to (their) kid,'' Grossman said. ``Chris is the symbol of a survivor, whether he came from Saudi Arabia or the high school playing field. People like to see that it's a happy ending.''

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PHOTO (Color) Carolyn James thanks God for her 17-year-old son Chris' recovery from burns suffered in a physics class accident at Hart High School in November.

Shaun Dyer/Special to the Daily News