Badly burned girl hopes to meet Taylor Swift after taking strength in her music

The pictures of Taylor Swift are taped to the tall cabinet in the corner of the room now that 8-year-old Isabella McCune can sit up, propped by pillows and stuffed animals.

The pictures had been stuck to the ceiling above her bed for a time when she could only lie flat. On these images, word balloons have been added, allowing Swift to say, "Stay strong, Isabella!" and "Isabella is AMAZING!"

Isabella listens to the singer's music during the worst part of her day, when doctors at the Arizona Burn Center put her into a twilight sleep of sorts, and for two hours, sometimes three, they work on her, changing the dressings on burns that cover almost all of her body.

Isabella sings along, her sweet voice soft in the operating room.

"It calms me down," Isabella says. "Ready For It" is her favorite song. She likes "Blank Space," too.

Isabella wants to see Taylor Swift in concert at the University of Phoenix Stadium on Tuesday with the kind of desperation only an 8-year-old girl can summon. She gets teary when she talks about it.

If only wishing could make it happen.

Her mom shakes her head. There's just no way. Isabella can't leave the hospital. Not for months yet.

Getting Isabella up out of bed, into a soft purple gown, to the bathroom and then to stand with a walker takes her mom, a nurse, a physical therapist and an occupational therapist.

All that movement is excruciating. Isabella tries hard not to cry.

For her physical therapy, she is supposed to walk from her room and down the hall.

"You want to watch daddy the whole time so you can focus?" the physical therapist, Danika Hines, asks.

Isabella nods, sniffling. She turns the walker tentatively and steps carefully, her legs thick with bandages, the bottom of her blue socks textured with sticky strips so she doesn't slip.

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"Come on, Sissy," her dad calls. He chokes up watching her.

Her parents don't let Isabella see them cry. They make their faces blank when they see her wounds.

Sometimes, her dad, J.D. McCune, can't help it.

He blames himself for what happened.

'We're burned pretty bad.'

It was a horrible accident. J.D. and his neighbors were getting ready for a party on St. Patrick's Day.

The weather had cooled and J.D. had built a fire in a fire pit in his driveway. He used gasoline to ignite it.

The fire exploded, sending the flaming liquid into the air. J.D. caught on fire and turned away, trying to put out the flames.

He hadn't known Isabella also was on fire until he heard people calling her name. He ran to her.

A neighbor had dragged Isabella away from the fire and patted out the flames. She called, "Help me, daddy!"

Her teenage brother had run for the garden hose. J.D. doused Isabella to keep her skin cool. He could see her soccer shirt had melted into her skin.

"We're burned, Sissy," J.D. told his daughter. "We're burned pretty bad, but the ambulance is coming." Her eyes stayed on his face. She didn't cry.

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"Am I going to have to skip school?" Isabella asked. She loves her teacher and classmates at Boulder Creek Elementary School.

"We might have to," her dad told her.

Isabella was taken to the burn center of the Maricopa Integrated Health System in Phoenix. She spent the first 10 days in a medically-induced coma, a tube down her throat to help her breathe. She had suffered third-degree burns over 65 percent of her body.

Burns covered her hands and arms, one side of her torso, her buttocks and legs, front and back. Her face was mostly spared.

In six weeks, Isabella has had 10 surgeries, including one on this morning to clean her wounds. Skin grafts cover her hands and arms and one leg. Her other leg and buttocks are still uncovered, just raw muscle protected by bandages.

She hurts all the time, even with pain medication.

Whatever it takes to reach the goal

From the doorway of her hospital room, Isabella smiles at her dad. A feeding tube runs to her nose.

Behind him, about 15 feet away, burn technician Erin O'Neill calls for Isabella. "Come on, I want to dance with you."

Isabella walks gingerly toward her, taking tiny steps.

It is so unlike her, her dad says. Isabella used to run or dance everywhere. She'd turn cartwheels along the way.

But she is standing straighter than yesterday, her mom, Lilly McCune, says. Others nod in agreement. A nurse waves at her over the top of her computer. "Look at you!" another nurse calls.

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Isabella pauses. "Erin is going to keep moving back," she says, sniffling. O'Neill laughs. It's true, she had backed up another five feet.

Isabella taps her walker against the chair next to O’Neill and slowly turns around.

"We love that little girl," O'Neill says. She knows Isabella is in pain. She was in that morning's surgery and dressing change and she knows what is under those bandages.

But the more Isabella moves now, the better she will heal.

Isabella works hard in physical therapy, even through tears. "She loves to please," her mom says. "She will do whatever it takes to reach the goal."

Three weeks earlier, Isabella had taken her first few steps. Baby steps but steps, Isabella says. Standing for the first time, she got to hug her mom for real. The next day, she got to sit on her dad's lap. She leaned back into his arms.

"I miss snuggling with my dad," Isabella says.

'She is quite remarkable'

Just a hug can hurt. Her back was spared so her doctor, Kevin Foster, director of the burn unit, takes skin for her skin grafts from there.

He is using an experimental skin spray called ReCell with special permission from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

He mixes a sample of Isabella’s skin with enzymes that separate the skin cells into a spray solution, so she heals quicker and with less scarring.

Each time her back heals, he takes more skin for new grafts. He wants to use her own skin because there is less chance of rejection.

Foster might have left Isabella in a medically-induced coma for longer — it is the best way to deal with the horrendous pain of an injury like this — but in her waking moments, Isabella had pointed at the intubation tube in her mouth and hooked her thumb to tell him to take it out.

"She is quite remarkable," Foster says.

Back in her room now, Isabella is eased into a wheelchair, wrapped in a pink Super Girl blanket, her feet propped up against a foam triangle.

"Daddy," Isabella calls. He goes to her.

Good days and no complaining

Isabella lifts up her arms to show her hands and wiggles her fingers. The skin grafts under the compression bandages are healing nicely.

She can color and paint. She is decorating a shoe as an art project with the Arizona Burn Foundation. She points to the heel, which is black.

"That's how it feels when you first get to the hospital," she explains. "You're sad and you're scared."

She's painted the rest of the sole gold. "That's for positivity and happiness."

"It's always good to keep a smile on your face in the hospital in case another patient comes by and they see you," she says. "They might be sad or scared and need a smile."

Isabella hardly ever complains. She says "thank you" to the nurses after they perform procedures, even if it was painful.

Most days are surprisingly good. Isabella lights up every time a lullaby plays over the speaker system, a signal that a baby has been born. She calls out to people walking by her door to come in and visit.

There are some days when Isabella doesn't want to get out of bed, like on April 27, when her parents had planned a surprise party for her in the hospital’s courtyard.

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A new level of strength

Even before this, Isabella was a rule follower.

She won't cheat, either. Her mom tried to help her out of bed one day, but Isabella told her, "Mom, I don't want to cheat."

Her mom wouldn't tell anyone. Just this once.

"Mom, I have to do it myself," Isabella told her.

"She's a tough little girl," her dad says. He spent 10 days in the burn unit, the wounds on his arms and hands healed now and a compression bandage over the healing burn on his leg. Even he can't imagine what she is going through.

"We have been trying to keep optimistic and positive," her mom Lilly says. She never really understood the phrase "One day at a time" until now.

The only time Isabella asked why this happened to her, she answered herself, her mom says.

Isabella had been sitting on her brother's lap when the fire exploded, her body protecting his from the brunt of it. He's 14 and diabetic.

"If I wasn't sitting on his lap, he wouldn't have been able to do this," Isabella told her mom.

"She was always a tough girl, always strong, but this is a new level of strength," Lilly says.

"That's the kind of person she is," her dad says.

A surreal moment, but better now

One of the people waiting to see Isabella was Jayson Pena, their neighbor from seven houses down.

He wasn't even supposed to be home that weekend. He is an assistant coach for an arena football team in New Mexico, the Duke City Gladiators, and had been waiting on a refurbished helmet to get done. It wasn't ready on time, and it was too late to catch the team bus.

Pena had been standing in the McCune's driveway with his back to the fire pit when he heard the explosion. He turned around to see J.D. on fire, trying to put out the flames. Then he saw Isabella lying on the driveway, engulfed in flames.

"Help me!" she called. "Help me!"

Pena pulled Isabella into the grass by her wrist and then patted out the flames with his hands.

He called 911, cautioning J.D. to turn the water from the garden hose low. A strong spray would take off her skin.

Pena couldn't believe what had happened. "It was so surreal. It was like a scene out of a movie," he says.

Pena had met Isabella officially on Halloween, though he had seen her in the neighborhood before. Isabella was trick-or-treating with her dad, wearing a Darth Vader costume but no light saber. He loaned her his.

After that, Isabella came over regularly to play with his daughter, Paisley, who's 4.

She called him "Mr. Jayson" and his wife "Mrs. Katie."

"She's like one of our own," Pena says.

Paramedics loaded J.D. into one ambulance and Isabella into the other. Pena, his hands burned, his eyebrows singed, a burn on his leg, had jumped into the back of the ambulance and kissed Isabella on the forehead.

"Am I going to be OK?" she asked him.

"You are going to be just fine," he told her.

But Isabella wasn't just fine. Pena knew that. An Army veteran, he also had friends in New Mexico who were firefighters and he had volunteered with them for seven years before moving to Arizona three years ago.

Pena had a hard time sleeping. "I kept seeing her face through the flames," he says.

He had not seen Isabella since then, though he had been in touch with her parents. He was doing the landscaping work for J.D.'s company, Desert Sun Installations, and his wife had set up a GoFundMe account for the family that has raised $18,000.

She came out in a wheelchair, her hair in Princess Leia buns and a light saber on her lap.

"I'm telling you," Pena says, "It was rough. I'm not going to lie. It was tough to see her."

But in all the excitement of her teacher and friends being there, Pena got a moment with Isabella. He told her he missed her around the neighborhood and that he and Mrs. Katie had something special for her when she came home.

Her face had lit up. Pena felt better.

"I know that she's OK now," he says. "That puts me at a better peace of mind now."

A message for Taylor Swift

Isabella will need several more surgeries to finish covering all her exposed areas, her doctor says. As she grows, she may need more surgeries.

But she will get better. In two years, Foster, the burn unit director, imagines Isabella at Camp Courage, a summer program for young burn victims put on by the Arizona Burn Foundation, where he volunteers.

He suspects she'll run around, ride horses and swim.

And maybe Isabella will get to meet Taylor Swift, even if she can't go to her concert.

From her hospital bed, in a soft voice, Isabella videotaped a message for the singer.

"I heard you were here, and I wanted to visit you but maybe you can come and visit me. So maybe that can happen," she says.

"Your music has helped me go through all my tough times.

"When I'm doing my dressing changes, they ask me if I want to listen to Taylor Swift just to calm me down, and it always works."

Isabella will be at the hospital, waiting, looking at the pictures, singing along.

Reach Bland at karina.bland@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8614. Read more here.

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