Im not a masochist by any means, but recently at work I’ve been picking up a lot of burns. (I work at a sit down Pizza resturant, making and putting pizzas in the oven.) Anyway, I have three burns that I have questions about.
First and foremost the main question is “What types of burns are permanent?”
The first burn I have is at the base of my middle finger on the back of my left hand. This burn is the one I am most concerned about, as it came from contact with the oven and is the most disfiguring. The part that was burned is now a distinct different color, and looks as if it is on a ‘lower’ layer of skin, which is darker, and way less wrinkled.
The second burn comes from touching a pan about a minute after it came out of the oven. (I do not usually ‘pull’ the pizza, so it did not register with me that the pan would still be that hot.) Its on my thumb, and it looks as if a blister would have forumed, had I not flushed it with cool water…(advice given to me from the other puller) .
The thrid burn and most recent, is to my forearm, was a brief brush with a pan, and looks like a sunburn, looks half gone already.
In short, which of these should I worry about, and what can I do about it?
you can tell mainly by tissue loss or scabbing. How bad or if you get a scar though even with a fairly bad burn depends a lot of both your reaction to the burn (cold water is a good idea, ice can be better an…speed counts)
Post burn is a matter of how bad the blistering is, if any, and how well you treat the injury later as far as using salves to lessen drying and keep the skin pliable as it heals. Basically if you don’t develop some scabbing you are not likely to get any burn, but just like a large scrape can scar much worse than a smaller one of equal depth so can a burn.
I worked as a roll-boy at a restaurant, pulling large baking sheets of sourdough rolls out of a 450F oven. We were required to wear large insulated gloves that came about halfway up our forearms so that we wouldn’t burn ourselves on the tray, the oven rack, or anything near it. I have two pretty bad scars where the gloves didn’t cover from a nasty one-in-ten-thousand type mishap.
I treated both burns within one minute, and placed clean dressing with antibacterial ointment on them three times a day – usually. My biggest mistake was taking the dressing off for one eight-hour chunk, and going bodyboarding in the ocean on my day off. Because of the way I wait for waves (right arm draped over the bodyboard, left arm and legs treading/paddling) my right arm got sunburned along with most of the parts of me that were out of the water. Apparently the first-degree *re-*burning of the already third-degree burn prevented my body from healing it all the way. Either that, or the immersion in cool salt water allowed my left arm to heal up completely.
Today I’ve still got two scars, but the right one is puckered and shiny, and doesn’t tan; the left one is barely visible, still gets freckles, and if I’m on the beach for a week, it tans again.
So: change your dressings often, apply anti-bacterial burn cream, and if you think it’ll help, soak your burns in strong salt water.