A Survivor's Painful Comeback : Wildfires: After five months of skin grafts and torturous treatments of burns suffered in the Calabasas-Malibu blaze, Ron Mass steps out of the hospital. His ordeal is not yet over, but he says family and friends pulled him through.

By JOHN M. GLIONNA

April 15, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Slowly, like a wounded soldier who had outlived the war, Ron Mass walked unflinchingly Thursday from a Sherman Oaks hospital where he had endured more than five months of surgery since being severely burned during last fall’s Calabasas-Malibu wildfire.

His feet wrapped in bandages, his face, neck, arms and hands showing the blotchy red ravages of countless skin grafts, Mass ended a 163-day recuperation that was the longest inpatient stay in the 25-year history of the Sherman Oaks Burn Center.

Despite his obvious pain, the brown eyes of the 40-year-old carpenter shone brightly in a flash of pride and recognition that he was indeed still alive.

On that November morning, Mass had rushed onto what was nearly ground zero of the blaze, a Topanga Canyon ranch in an unsuccessful effort to save his friend, British screenwriter and director Duncan Gibbins, who eventually perished trying to save his cat.

The fire scorched a wide swath of the Santa Monica Mountains, killing four people, charring 18,000 acres and causing millions of dollars in damage.

Mass suffered burns to 75% of his body and spent the first eight weeks after the fire in a tortured half-sleep as doctors worked around the clock to salvage enough healthy skin to replace that which had burned away.

But as Christmas and then Easter passed, as winter turned to spring and the once-charred Malibu and Topanga canyons became green and filled with wildflowers, Ron Mass continued to heal.

On Thursday, he moved to a nearby hospital to continue his physical therapy. To the applause of the hospital staff, Mass walked down a tiled corridor, out into the harsh sunlight and glare of television cameras. In the lot, his trembling right hand held by a sister he had not seen for 12 years before the fire, he stood silently and soaked in the adulation as if at a postwar victory parade.

In a weakened voice, Mass thanked his family and his doctors--several of whom stood behind him--for helping him reach deep inside himself to find a stubborn resolve not to die, not to let the flames have the final say.

“I’m feeling pretty overwhelmed by all this,” he said, shooting a glance at his sister, Pat Anderson, who squeezed his hand. “Without the support of my family and friends, their being there all the time, I wouldn’t have made it. I would not have pulled through.”

Under a revealing morning sun, Mass showed the signs of his half-year battle. His black hair was matted. His face showed the pinkish blotches and veins that suggested that his new skin was still painfully thin. His purplish hands shook uncontrollably.

Conscious of his appearance, Mass had asked that cameramen refrain from close-up shots of his face, especially his burned nose and ears.

“Ron still feels sort of funny about his looks,” said friend Peter Alexander, who owns the 10-acre ranch where Mass once worked and lived in a trailer and where Gibbins had rented a small bungalow. “His most difficult moment came a month ago when he saw a reflection of himself in a pane of glass. He still doesn’t want to look into any mirrors.”

But Mass has come a long way from the morning of Nov. 2 when he was rushed to the burn center with what doctors say was “about a zero chance of survival,” a patient whose feet were the sole part of his body left untouched by the fire. And they were later used for skin grafting.

Fighting a 104-degree temperature, Mass began the first of 35 surgeries to combine donor skin with comparatively healthy skin from his chest and upper thighs to cover the rest of his body--twice-a-week surgeries that became increasingly painful.

At first, there was more bad news than good. Mass developed an infection that caused some of the newly applied skin to slip away. “The more conscious he became,” Alexander said, “the more he dreaded those operations.”

As the skin finally started to heal, Mass began agonizing therapy to relearn how to move his wounded hands, which suffered such severe tendon damage that he needs help eating and writes a shaky, unrecognizable signature.

Throughout his recovery, Mass was haunted by images of his unsuccessful attempt to save Gibbins--bitter scenes of flames roaring around him, melting the tires of his Jeep during his escape, forcing him to run the last 500 feet to safety with his arms held over his eyes.

“He remembers that day but he doesn’t like to think about it,” Alexander said. “He doesn’t like fire.”

During his recovery, Mass was reminded of his friendship with the good-natured Gibbins, how Mass yelled at his rescuers that Gibbins was still somewhere in the fire zone. And how the director’s last words to rescuers were about Mass: “Did they save my friend?”

But the most helpful tool of his recovery came when he awoke one day to see the faces of his long-estranged family staring over his bed. Anderson explained that a sister in the San Francisco area had seen a newspaper photograph of her brother covered in flames.

Despite 12 years of not knowing where Ron was living or what he was up to, the family rushed to his side. Mass recalls their presence as an island of calm amid his pain.

“They all started talking to me like we had never stopped talking, like the conversation had just kept going all those years,” he said of his six sisters. “They were very supportive. They didn’t bother me with questions about what I had been doing.”

While doctors marvel at his recovery, Mass sees his survival as a chance to make up for past mistakes. And, most of all, to reunite with his family.

Anderson says her brother’s ordeal has taught her a lesson: “Don’t ever let something silly come between you and your family. Do something now to make amends.

“Don’t wait, like I did, until you almost lose them.”