Just yesterday, I had some soup cooking on the stovetop for a couple of hours, then decided to clean that area. I was smart enough to use a potholder when removing the rack, then stupidly grabbed that round metal disk on top of where the gas comes out, with my bare hand. YEEEEOOOOWWWW!!! Luckily, I have a big aloe plant for just this kind of emergency. Nothing beats fresh aloe for burns, even sunburns.
You went to the Emergency Room for three fingertips of second degree burns? Man, you must have been a hit over there.
Sucks about the hand, though.
Well, the Internet told me to.
And nobody there seemed particularly in danger of dying, either. There was only one person you could pick out from her ride, and she was in a wheelchair and a thousand years old so you know she probably didn’t drive the car. Honestly, I was the only one who even seemed to be in pain, although of course it’s not like all emergencies come with a towel full of blood or anything.
They had House on the TV.
My sympathies Zsofia. A couple of weeks ago I was smoking a pork loin -yes, it’s hard to keep it lit - and I noticed the coals/wood cooling off so I added some more wood. I then added some more lighter fluid. I then…(by the way, I have one of those combination grill/smokers so it’s sort of like an elongated Weber, and I was doing all this through a door in the side) reached toward it with the lighter and experienced the wonderful sensation of flames gushing out at my hand. I lost about half the hair and of course it stung like a really stingy thing. It’s healing but it’ll be at least another week or two before it’s completely back to normal.
That was stupid, of course, because I’m an adult. The time I really burned myself I at least had the excuse of being a young child. (I may have told this story before;))
When I was about six years old and we were living at the jail the grocery store behind us had an incinerator. At one point that summer a crew was painting it and after a few days, being a curious kid, I wondered if the paint was dry. So, I walked up to it, apparently oblivious to the heat and palmed it.
It was dry. It was also hot. It obviously wasn’t too hot since I still have both hands but I was in bandages for a while.
My first experience with memorably burning myself was in Home Ec class in middle school. We were baking pies in glass pans, and when I went to pull the dish out of the oven, one of my pot holders slipped, giving me a solid skin-to-hot-dish grip. Course, the pain only kicked in when I had the dish off the rack and in the air, meaning I had to overcome my immediate instinct to drop the dish and hop around swearing. I managed to finish lifting the thing and put it on the counter and get my hand under cold water… all without saying a thing. If I would have opened my mouth I’m fairly certain I would have ended up in detention. The tips of my fingers blistered pretty badly, but it was on my non-dominant hand, and was gone in about a week.
[HS]Mmmm… caramel charcoal, glarrrgghh…[/HS]
One time I was cooking in my grandmother’s electric oven using the broiler. Taking the food out, wasn’t paying attention and hit the back of my hand on the element. The charred part of my skin stuck to it when I peeled my hand off.
This reminds me: I treat my body like crap. Yet I almost never get sick. And by ‘almost never’ I mean I haven’t been ill or sick for at least five years. I have known people who treat their body like a temple (One is an amateur boxer) who get sick on a regular basis.
I once had a good friend who had an OCD about food. He couldn’t eat from plastic bottles. He wouldn’t order from a restraunt (He brought his own food which was usualy unbuttered brown bread with tuna) I often wondered if he knew that humans had an immune system for dealing with stuff from the outside world which might contain bacteria but I never talked to him about it. I also never mentioned to him that humans contain billions of bacteria. I felt it would be the height of cruel to do so. No, I placed his peace of mind above his knowledge of the truth. I felt that it would probably difficult or impossible to convince him that bacteria was a) not a threat and b) sometimes a good thing.
Sometimes. Not always, but sometimes.
My worst burn was when I was 8, riding our Honda mini-bike (a 50cc motorcycle) on an oil rig lease in the middle of a forest somewhere in Alberta. Lease roads are built for temporary use and tend to be loosey goosey near the edges.
I got a little cocky by wanting to jump the bike over a smallish tree limb near the side of the road.
Epic fail. I land in the ditch with the mini-bike’s blazingly hot exhaust pipe resting on my bare right ankle and lower leg. I quickly pushed the bike/yanked my foot away and saw a 3" x 2" blister, partially charred black. I stared at it a bit longer and realized it was a smudge of oily dirt.
True to my nature, I decide to push this stupid bike that is two-thirds my weight out the sloping end of a long loose dirt and rock ditch. Shortly after I came up into view of the rig, limping and pushing the bike back to our trailer, I see my Dad hustling towards me across the Forbidden Zone.
Also true to my nature, having reached Crisis Over, I start blubbering and point to the blister on my ankle, now ripped open and my raw oozy flesh is caked with dirt. I had never seen my dad’s eyebrows shoot up like that before.
It’s healed to a perma-tan brown and is oddly covered with freckles.
A friend stopped by my shop wanting me to use my cutting torch to get a trailer ball off of his trailer hitch. I thought (yeah, right!) that it was a small effort and not worth putting on all my protective gear, so I proceded to cut with no gloves or jacket and wearing my tennis shoes.
A ball of red hot molten steel about the diameter of a pencil popped off and dropped down on the nylon top of my left foot. The glob of Lucifer’s spit settled down between two of my toes and made itself at home. It hurt so bad that I couldn’t move, cry OR curse; I just stood there and took it.
My friend then suggested that it may have been a better choice to have cut the ball off with the portable bandsaw. (Against my better judgement, I let him live.)
On the bright side, I had a bad case of athletes foot at the time which disappeared the next day and has never returned.
I have put my bandage into costume by drawing little ghost eyes on it. I would have done a mummy but my left handed artistic skills only extend to little eyes.
Unless I missed someone’s post, I think I’m the first person to add a story about getting badly burned by splashing hot deep-fry oil on myself. I was making Indian food for 20 hungry people, and one of the pakora spit at me. Deposited a tablespoon of oil across the back of my hand. Hurt like a bastard, and blistered almost immediately. I doused it in cold water and ran an ice cube across it, and then went back to cooking, because did I mention the 20 hungry people?
It took five years before the dark-brown scar had faded to the point where I have to look closely to see it.
Hello, my name is Glass. 
I’m so sorry alice, but that’s so funny! 
I need to stop reading threads about bad things happening to people-- I read this thread yesterday, and today I burnt myself at work–not as badly as Zsofia did but there is definitely a blister or something on my thumb (non-dominant hand) and also on my middle finger (the index finger is less burnt). On the plus side, I’m not the person who got the pan hot–but I should have known it hadn’t been sitting there long enough to cool off.
And, I read Pullet’s threads about her car troubles. Well, I took my car in for an inspection and a routine oil change and had repairs recommended which probably cost more than my car is worth. (on the other hand, it’s been reliable, it’s only 8 years old, with 63K miles on it, and I’m not ready to buy a new car, but I still have to do some juggling to figure out how to pay for it).
My sister-in-law burnt her hand badly the other day. She was at Whole Foods getting soup and dripped some on her hand. It was boiling hot and she quickly wiped it off with her other hand, peeling a layer of skin off with it… her hand looked awful, all shiny, red and blistered. Today, it is just one big blister, almost 2 inches in diameter. The serve-yourself soup at the grocery store should NOT be that hot!!
I thought it was a film reference. Burns was great in Oh My Fucking God!, not so much in Oh My Fucking God! Book II and Oh My Fucking God! You Fucking Devil!.
I’m the idiot that dumped a fresh Americano from Earth Fare on my lap in the car on the way to work one day a couple of months ago. I am *not *the idiot, however, that used her crotch as a cupholder. I have a very valid excuse, you see.
It seems that the dufus engineers at Chrysler Dodge decided that the cupholders should be on the floor just far enough forward so that the driver has to lean forward to reach them AND that gearshift should be really long and stick out well past the steering wheel and sit directly between the driver and cupholders. The forward momentum of a cup of steaming hot fucking espresso and water abruptly halted by contact with a fixed fucking gearshift will cause a paper cup to buckle, popping off the lid and eliminating any previous human grip on it.
As Coffeecrotch lady also discovered to her severe misfortune, scalding hot coffee burns, yes, but scalding hot coffee-soaked pants are a whole new level of motherfucking Ouch. When you do manage to peel them off your skin, they invariably take some skin off with them as a reward for their efforts.
I have two bright red hash marks left on my right thigh as a result of Dodge’s little engineering fuck-up. That’s where the hot pants stuck to my leg. The rest of the red that covered my entire thigh from front to back faded within a couple of days, fortunately. I also rear-ended somebody at the stoplight where all this went down who decided it was in her best interest to not stop and get insurance information from the raving lunatic in the pickup sitting on her back bumper. I sure hope I didn’t cause any damage to your vehicle, dear. Sorry!
It’s serendipitous that I happen to work in a retail establishment that sells apparel and I had a great excuse to buy a new pair of pants that day. But, yeah, oh my FUCKING GOD, that hurts!
You know what else burns? Airbags. Friction and chemicals–lovely combination, that.
Three weeks ago I was driving down the road, and a driver on a side street apparently doesn’t see me coming and pulls out from her stop sign prematurely, smack dab into the middle of the intersection. Well, I hit the brakes, but can’t quite avoid a collision. My steering wheel airbag deploys, and now I have burns on both thumbs from the first knuckle almost down to the wrists.
I think the adrenaline surge of the whole experience kept my hands from hurting all that badly. (I told the nurse in the emergency room where I was transported that it was a 4 on that stupid pain scale.) I second Lynn Bodoni’s recommendation of Silvadene cream if you can get it; it is prescription only here but it is wonderfully soothing.
I’m now past the hideous blistering, puckering and peeling off of the dead skin phases. I’m now at the raw-looking pink skin phase, which makes a particularly ugly contrast with my brown skin. I’m vain about my hands, and I’m hoping against hope that the scars won’t be too bad.
The only thing amazing about this story is that I really have no permanent scars from it. Still, i hope to win the thread, as it is a true story!
1989-90…i had a 1974 mustang that was in bad shape, but I was broke, I had a shitty job and my fat, lazy cousin lived with me. he was on disability, but “Clucky” as we all called him, was fantastically lazy. On a rainy saturday morning he asked to use my car to drive to a sub shop, a local family owned one. No surprise. He loved sub sandwiches. This place had been open my entire life. I won’t lie, they made good subs! clucky would by two or three and put them in the fridge for the weekend. I gave him the keys but reminded him my gas guage was broken and he had to stop at the FIRST gas station to put gas in the car. I knew from experience he did not have enough gas right then for a round trip.
Man, i was wrong. He ran out of gas a few miles down the road. Now me? i would have taken the gas can from the trunk and walked to the gas station. It was only a smidgen of a bit further than walking back to the house. But clucky walked back to the house. So now we both had to go to the gas station. (because i refused to let him sit in the nice warm house while i went out in the rain to get my car that he left on the side of the road.) We got to the car…and i noticed it was in a place a 1/4 of a mile from my high school buddy’s house. well, his mother’s house, but he lived with his mom.
clucky knew that too. Heck, I would cut my buddie’s mom’s grass weekly as a favor. Anyway, my buddy (it was around 9 AM) was asleep, but he loaned me his car to get gas for mine. I was wearing an old army “all weather coat” at the time. after putting gas in the tank i knew the only way to crank the engine was to put a drop of gas in the carburetor. I lifted the hood, and Clucky got in the car. I began carefully pouring a few drops in the carburetor…and I said to Clucky "When i say crank, it, crank it". He says "Ok, Crank it!’ and starts the engine…just as i’m putting the gas in the carburetor. a jet of flame leaps up setting my coat on fire. More freaked than hurt at first i began running around like a headless chicken…i mean, hell, I’m on FIRE! the collar of my coat was in flames and yes…after the shock of being on fire (which lasted about 2 seconds) left the fear and pain set in.
I had no choice but to leap into a roadside rain puddle to put the flame out. as i lay in the puddle enjoying the coolness of the muddy water Clucky asked me what to do. I told him to get my buddy and his mom…she was retired but she was nurse. Bottom line I had bad burns on my neck, and chin but nothing the local ER couldn’t handle. (My buddy called me “Darkman” after the movie character because of the bandages). Man, it hurt like hell though. I am shocked myself that I’m not disfigured. There is only a small area on my neck where I can say its actually still scarred.