28 September 2007

First-aid for burns

(Warning: clicking on the picture to the left will lead to a blog containg images that some viewer may find disturbing, espcially overeaters.)

Something I told my daughter almost twenty years ago, when she was 14 or 15, saved my 1½ year-old grandson from getting a very serious burn on his hand the other day. He put his hand, palm down, on a hot ceramic stovetop. His mother, S-Cat, remembered me saying when I was on the local volunteer ambulance squad that running cold water over a burn right away can reduce what would be a third-degree burn to a second, or a second-degree burn to a first. So she immediately picked him up, turned around and ran cold water over his hand. Fortunately she had been standing right there. At the burn center, they said she probably had prevented him getting a third-degree burn and that he might get away without even getting any blisters.

Care-takers of children, please take note! Of course this works equally well for the older ones of us who are occasionally unfortunate enough to get burned as well. Personally I like using ice even better, because it kills the pain. Just gotta be sure you don't freeze the tissue, which is a real danger, because as soon as you remove the ice, the searing pain returns almost immediately.

2 comments:

Scott W said...

That food website is a bit over my head.

Namenlosen Trinker said...

Well, Scott, I was searching for an image of a ceramic stovetop and this one was the best I could find. Normally Blogger links images to their original version, but in this case I manually changed the link to point to the food blog, simply because I found it so interesting.

The food blog website has absolutely nothing to do with the post (which is not my normal practice and may be the reason you found it confusing).