Saturday, September 22, 2007

A long long time ago...

About seven years ago, my husband worked as a chef in a restaurant. Chef is just a nice word for cook. He worked the late hours, from four till close, and I would often take our infant son to coffee with me where my husband would meet us after work.

One night, close to midnight, he walked in with a big ice cream pail full of ice. His hand was buried in it and he kept saying, S'OK, I'm fine, but he clearly wasn't.

You see, while I don;t know a lot about skin, i DO know it should be on us rather than floating around in the rapidly melting ice.

It seems that some one called for an order of Fingers (chicken fingers) and my husband took them literally, and stuck his hand up to the wrist in a deep fryer.*

It took a while for me and the people with us at coffee to convince my husband he might want to go to the hospital and have his skinless hand looked at. Eventually, he agreed.

Turns out he had second and third degree burns from wrist to fingertips. The ER techs spent a lot of time peeling off the dead and crispy skin and then covered his hand in cream, bandaged it and sent him home with pain pills and orders to return the next day to get more dead skin peeled off.

If the dead skin stays on, you really increase your chance of infection.

We had to go back and forth to the hospital for about two weeks as they peeled and picked at his hand, but it was like a Miracle burn - he was left with NO scarring what-so-ever! The doctor was amazed at how fast he had healed first of all, but he was more astounded at the lack of scaring as he had burned in places to the muscle.

I'm very glad he healed with no problems, and it still makes me giggle to say deep fryer and watch him go pale.

*Actually, that's just a joke he tells, what really happened is he had been cleaning the deep fryer with a metal pole thingy but had grabbed the wrong pole, it was shorter one, and when he pushed it in, his hand went in as well.

2 comments:

Not a Granny said...

Love the picture of the boys!!! This looks really nice!

Bluepaintred said...

Heh. Sheila to the rescue - again!