A bit over a month ago, I scalded my hand. Enough for it to take some weeks to heal, but not enough for it to require medical attention. I want to be clear about that last part, because so many of my well-meaning friends and family were insistent I should have gone to…where, exactly? That wasn’t clarified. Seeing as I work in a hospital, am the literal purchaser of the reputable information for clinicians, and knew where to look to double check the care information, I didn’t think it was a good idea to go wait to be told the self-management practices when I could cut out the middleman and just read them myself.
For the record, my nurse friends looked at my hand, said, “wow you really did burn it. It’s coming along, though,” and nothing more was added.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s back up.
My partner and I set out on a bright summer Saturday morning to get breakfast at a nearby bakery, and then proceed to the climbing gym to meet a friend and her new boyfriend. (I wasn’t going to climb, I was headed to read in the café part of the climbing gym.) We stopped into the bakery to get out pastries, and decided to get some tea. My partner has really taken to tea over the last year, and so I ordered us two cups of black tea. He took the pastries to a table on the bakery’s patio, while I busied myself adding some sugar to our cups.
We were going to have to fish the tea bags out, I reasoned, so I stuffed the lids under my arm and picked up the lidless-to-go-cups to carry out to the table.
You see what happened here, yes?
I spilled the tea not two steps into my journey, all over my right index finger. Letting loose a couple curses, I set the cups down on the counter, put the lids back on, told the server that I’d spilled some tea on the floor, carried the tea out, and then went back into the washroom to run water over my hand. It was stinging and throbbing a bit, the shock still keeping the worst of the initial pain away.
While I had my right hand under the tap, I pulled out my phone to consult the burn topic under Minor Ailments on the CPS, a required resource for pharmacies and of course something a hospital librarian would have on her phone. I’m aware of my capabilities as a medical practitioner (as in I do not have any) but I’m also aware of what is and isn’t a minor ailment. Finally this literature searching thing is paying off.
My finger wasn’t quite so bad that first day, after I took some Advil, held it to the cold glass of a smoothie at the climbing gym, and ran more water over it. It began to blister that night, and then -
The blister popped while I was driving home the next day. And this is when the difficulty began. I had to wrap my finger to protect it now, and this presented two problems:
I hate wearing bandages. I think this is some sort of sensory reaction, but also part of me trying to keep from cutting off another sense, since vision and I already struggle.
I’m right-handed.
I had to bandage my hand to protect it for more than a week, and that first week was the hardest, because I couldn’t really move my finger with it wrapped. Do you know how much you use the index finger on your dominant hand, really?
I sat in my office, having given up on typing with my regular speed and scrolling through search results with any kind of efficiency, turning to my pile of unopened mail. We have a lot of mail coming in and out of the library, and in my library, it’s me who deals with it (because there’s no one else).
I was trying to keep myself from knocking my finger any further, or damage the wrap. I was feeling tender and sore, and completely incapable of opening a box and breaking it down.
It took me a solid five minutes to open a basic box of books that day.
I skipped any cooking which required a lot of active time that week. I didn’t bake the bread I wanted, I struggled to pick things up when I needed them. Putting in contacts turned out to be harder than I wanted.
These were all very small things, but they weighed on me, dragging down my week. And the explaining! My coworkers in the hospital were fine with a quick “I burned myself,” but in the rest of life? People wanted an explanation as to why my finger was wrapped up. Then, when my finger was healed enough to take off the wrapping, I then had to explain the wreck of my hand and the shiny pink new skin.
By all measures, my hand healed well and within the proper timeframe. It took three weeks from burn to the last of the dead skin to flake off, leaving a slightly pink splash scar on my index finger and base of my middle finger. It otherwise feels like the rest of my hand, and the scar has faded considerably even since last week, the newer skin difficult to spot. I kept it clean and safe, and my body was given space to let it heal, in all its itchy, new glory. It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten a scar; my clumsiness hasn’t yielded many injuries these last few years.
Perhaps I would feel differently if this scar was on my face, for example, but I don’t mind it. Yes, it’s the product of me not being especially bright. It was painful, and it kept me from doing my regular tasks in the way I always do them. I spent a fortune in new dressings, though a coworker told me I could swipe some from their unit instead. I watched my skin go from normal to ravaged to new, and now it’s settling. It reminded me of the way we change every day, in less visible ways. It reminded me of the healing I’ve done over the last year or so, since the acute phase of the pandemic.
It’s also put me off tea for a bit. Not because tea isn’t still delicious, but because I clearly can’t handle boiling water that well. I’m working on it.
Glad you got past this!
Glad the burn wasn't more serious!