I won’t go into the details how I did it, it was too stupid.
within a minute, I had it iced down and had ice on it for 90 minutes or so. but every time i take the ice away, the pain starts back. sharp severe pain. puttingh my finger back in the ice bath alleviates the pain.
a blister has formed on the entire tip of my left index finger.
when will the pain subside? The ice bath is uncomfortable, but preferable to the burning pain.
does it still hurt?
Ice isn’t what you want for a burn. Cool to tepid water to stop the initial burning. After that, you just have to wait it out.
nearly two hours later, yes it still stings when I take the finger out of the bath.
It will be a few days at the very least. Your fingertips have the highest concentration of nerve endings in the body so the pain is magnified.
And as the nerves heal, they may start to hurt a bit again.
I’m a 50 year old man that has more than my fair share of injuries. 3 weeks ago, I hit my thumb with the direct flame of a polypropalean torch while doing some plumbing. That hurt. I mean, really, really hurt.
Today was the first day that I could go without a bandage on it. About a week AFTER I burned it, it started bleeding. If there is such a thing as a 4th degree burn, I have/had it. Cooked. It I did. Well done.
I had a severe burn on my right index finger a couple of years ago from an oil fire. I was holding the skillet and trying to get it out of the house. The heat from the burning oil was about an inch from my finger, although I don’t think the flames actually got me. It took me what seemed like an hour (probably about 60 seconds) to get the skillet to the back door, get the door unlocked, and hurl the pan into the yard. The skin along the length of my index finger was completely shriveled up and gray.
The ER doctor wasn’t sure how bad the burn was because it had already started to form a big blister by the time the doctor saw me. He prescribed some kind of cream (silver sulfur something) and percocet and told me to resist the urge to pop the blister.
The pain was excruciating, but if I kept my hand in a bucket of water, the pain stopped. I couldn’t keep doing that, so I tried the percocet and it worked pretty well. The pain died down in about 5 days. Then a few days later, the blister (which was about twice the size of my finger) popped and the pain started over. This time, it only lasted a day or so.
Mine also bled suddenly one night about a week after the blister popped. I couldn’t ever figure out where the blood came from and never saw a drop after that. It’s not like there was an open cut or anything. Must’ve been osmosis.
The final result was the the burn was more like a severe scald and there was no permanent damage. The skin was a little tight when it first healed making it difficult to fully bend my finger/make a fist. That loosened up within a month and now, I just have some whiter-than-normal skin where the burn was, which I may have caused because I cleaned it with peroxide several times a day for a few weeks.
wonders why runner pat posted the criteria for a fourth degree burn since those are rather rare. blisters are usually the indicators of a 2nd degree burn. with burns immediate response is cool to tepid water to draw the heat away, after that dressing and keeping the wound clean.
Read enipla’s post right above mine.
well, I have been keeping the finger in cool water ever since 4:45 pm cst, about 6.5 hrs.
it still stings when I take it out.
I work in a restaurant kitchen, so I’ve burned the shit out of myself like… a zillion times.
Lidocaine burn ointment helps a lot. Running it under cool water helps, but you don’t want to sit by the sink for days until it heals. Hot water and radiant heat from hot things makes it hurt worse. To some degree, it hurts less the less you think about it. Slap some burn ointment on it, wrap it in a fingertip bandage, and go about your day as best you can. It may hurt for a while and it may get better and then hurt worse.
Hope you feel better soon.
Almost 24 hours later, I got a a blister on the tip of finger that might be 1 sq inch in area. I don’t have big fingers. The tip of finger hurt so bad that I didn’t realize that I burnt another part on the middle section too. That blister is not as nearly as big or severe. My thumb and middle finger should have been burned as well, but there are no blisters there. Strange.
But the sharp, stinging pain has subsided, thank goodness. There is still some discomfort. Thanks for the ideas.
I also used to work in restaurants and burned myself more times than I can count. I think that the cold water (or lidocaine spray), while soothing is actually counter-productive in the long run because every time you remove the burned area from the cold, the return of the pain is magnified by comparison. In my experience, you just end up prolonging things by not allowing yourself to sort of “adjust” to the pain, and start blocking it out. The best way I found to deal with it was to run cold water on it enough to stop any more burning, and then to just let it hurt. The sooner you start doing that, the sooner it starts to subside. I also concur with SurrenderDorothy that you have to do something else and make yourself stop thinking about it.
Once when I was a teenager I worked at western show and one night I happened to walk from point A to point B with some black powder. Not totally sober, I thought it would be cool to put some of it on fire. So I poured some on the ground, got my lighter up, and put the flame to the powder. Nothing happened. Why won’t anything happen, I thought, the second before the black powder caught fire.
Hours later I still had my hand in a bucket of ice, and when it started to hurt out of the coldness of it, I took it out of there, and instantly it felt like the hand was on fire. So I shove it right back in there again – and the ice water made it hurt after a while, so I had to take it out, and in the same moment it was exactly like someone had set fire on it, so I put it back in again.
The whole night I was going on like this, I thought I was going insane, it just hurt so much. But as far as I remember the real pain had gone the next morning.
I grew some nice blisters, let me tell you. It was on my right hand, so every morning after breakfust (we had two shows a day), I had to make a little hole in each and every one of them and squeez the fluid of there (hit the roof once or twice, horay!), because I couldn’t use my pistol with those blisters. They grew out again, so I did this for a few days at least.
I felt so dumb about this I never told anybody what I’d done; also being drunk and playing around with powder if you’re part of a stunt show will – rightly so – make a persona non grata out of you, at best. I said I burnt my fingers while adjusting a log in the fire.
Anyhow, I’ve been in pain like everybody else now and then, but this will always stand out as “pain peak” for me.