UPDATE: 'Her face caught fire' (Statement from NOMC)
November 30, 2011 9:29 AM
By Paula Kelley | paulak@crestviewbulletin.com

A Holt woman was transported to a burn center in Mobile, Ala. Tuesday morning after a fire erupted while she was undergoing surgery at the Crestview Surgery Center.

Kim Grice, 29, was flown by helicopter to the South Alabama Burn Unit with burns to her face and neck.

Family members said Grice was undergoing routine surgery to have three cysts removed from her head when the fire erupted.

As of 5:30 p.m. Tuesday hospital officials had not commented on the cause of the accident, but said that a press release is forthcoming. The Crestview Fire Department, which responded to the fire, released a press release stating that "a flash fire during surgery" occurred, but fire officials provided no more details.

According to phone interviews with Grice's uncle, Ted Grice, and her mother, Ann Grice, also of Holt, Kim Grice's "face caught fire."

"The doctors and the hospital are not telling us what happened," Ted Grice said. "They said they had never seen anything like it before and they are terribly sorry that it happened."

"At 8 a.m. two patients were back there, one was my daughter," Ann Grice said. "At 10:20 emergency medical and the fire department pulled up and there was a fifty-fifty chance that they were coming through those doors for my daughter. I went to the desk and no one would tell me anything."

Ann Grice said that here daughter was taken to the emergency room at North Okaloosa Medical Center and flown from there to Mobile.

"I am in shock. This is not what happens with a routine outpatient surgery," she said. "She had headaches and the doctor was going to remove three cysts and biopsy them but something went bad wrong and my daughter is now in a burn unit with burn specialists and I still do not know what happened. No one will tell me why or how this happened to her."

Kim Grice is the mother of three small children.