Nine-year-old Martha “Marti” Feichter was gazing outside a car window when she noticed a stranger using a walker on the sidewalk. Before her mother had driven past him, Feichter observed the man falling.

“I scream out loud, ‘Stop the car, stop the car,’” she recalls, “and I open up the door, and I run back down the sidewalk to help him up.”

After aiding him, Feichter’s mother lectured her child about safety. Then she said something else: “I don’t know what you’re going to do, honey, when you grow up, but you’re going to end up helping others.”

Those words stayed with Feichter, who today runs support services for the Richard M. Fairbanks Burn Center at Eskenazi Health. Before assisting patients, she had earned a master’s degree in social work and helped multiple populations, first as a licensed social worker, then in nonprofit management. She spent years aiding the unhoused. While visiting with them, she says, “I felt like I was selling hope.”

When a job as a medical social worker opened at Eskenazi Health (then Wishard Health Services), Feichter didn’t think she was right for it, having never worked in health care. It’s been 20 years since she decided to apply anyway. “I was just in so much awe — still am actually, never lost that — of the nurses and doctors and therapists and everybody who just does amazing work with these patients,” she says.

Feichter soon found her calling working with burn patients. She was impressed with their resiliency in the face of bereavements as well as the physical, relationship, home and job losses that sometimes accompany burn injuries. After the monthly support group she proposed was approved, Feichter kept coming up with additional programming.

In 2009 she brought the Phoenix Society’s SOAR (Survivors Offering Assistance in Recovery) program to Eskenazi Health. Through this program Feichter brings in burn survivors who are former patients to visit with current patients. Surveys of patients’ SOAR experiences have consistently ranked from 6.5 to 7 on a 7-point Likert scale.

Now the burn center support services coordinator, Feichter invites others to offer multiple forms of treatment to patients, such as music therapy. A holistic approach to health care, she believes, “is far more effective for the patient thriving.”

Within months of her first program, Feichter realized she was again selling hope: helping struggling burn patients move past pain, loss, anger and despair.

One patient led Feichter to launch a new initiative, the Social Reintegration Program. This patient had been outgoing before her injury but became so self-conscious about her appearance after it that she avoided errands. Feichter thought activities among fellow burn survivors — like Indianapolis Indians games and escape rooms — could help some of them restart their social lives in a safe space. The patient who inspired the program became an active member and now jokes that her social calendar is too full when invited to new outings.

Some former patients join these outings — or, as Feichter calls them, “therapy with fun”— or the monthly support group long after treatments have ended. Such activities even lure initially resistant patients. Feichter recalls a patient angry about the burns and deaths that had resulted from an accident. This patient gave in to Feichter’s entreaties to join her monthly support group “just to get me to shut up,” she laughs. Later that patient ended up becoming a SOAR volunteer.

Feichter invites coworkers to the group outings, wanting those who aid patients in their most difficult moments to witness them as just people having fun and to see the rewards of their work. She is also eager to assist families, especially those traveling from states away to be there for loved ones during long burn recoveries. They remind Feichter of her parents’ commitment to their kids and grandkids. Her mother, so prescient about her daughter at 9 years old, was the one who had convinced Feichter to apply to Eskenazi Health.

When Sidney & Lois Eskenazi Hospital was being built, Feichter found an opportunity to help these families. She asked her siblings to join her in donating an overnight room to the new hospital in her parents’ names. One of the two family rooms in the Richard M. Fairbanks Burn Center is named after Don and Phyllis Feichter.

Feichter says walking by this room makes her feel “honored. I’m glad that we had the means to chip in and provide something that is so valuable to these families in distress.”

“I’ll love these patients and families until I die,” she says.