Injury sidebar
No, not mine...
I will be a little distracted for a few days (not that my output was so huge recently anyway), as my 4-year old daughter just got 2nd degree burns on the bottom of both of her feet today. I had just brought the twins by the MIT fields to see Jim and his kid. We were there maybe 10 minutes before we decided to take off. As we get ready to leave, Catherine, who was barefoot (on grass, imagine that), starts screaming. I look over at her, and she is on her knees next to the fence separating the fields from the street. She is on a concrete footing, with metal plates on top, and a little concrete curb. I figured she had stumbled and hit her shin on the curb. I walk over to her, trying to downplay the pain, but she doesn't stop crying, and when I get to her, she tries to show me her feet. I take a look, and both sets of soles and toes look like somebody who had just gotten out of the water after 3 hours (all wrinkled up), but are also white. I immediately pick her up, and race to the car to head to the emergency room with her screaming all the way. Fortunately, Jim and company had ice packs, so I grab a couple of those and give them to her to press against her feet.
15 minutes later, park illegally in front of the Mt. Auburn Hospital emergency room (no spots) and race inside with the kids. Standing at the check-in desk with a child continually screaming "I burned my feet, I burned my feet." As you can imagine, they don't make us wait for more than 3 minutes before they bring us in to triage (and only because they had to page a nurse), and then immediately bring us into a room. Doctor comes in, takes one look at her still bare feet, which by this time have completely swollen into HUGE blisters, and decrees 2nd degree burns. Wipe-down, bacitracin, tylenol-codeine (and needing to know precise weight for the kid, so that they could figure out an appropriate dose of the hard stuff), wife shows up after hurriedly driving over from the house. Also, Catherine has burned the fingers of both hands, she says from grabbing her feet after(! there were blisters on her fingers...), so they end up putting dressings on both feet and both hands. We walk out of the hospital carrying our little mummy, bring her to the house, and promptly lay her down on the couch in front of the TV to try and distract her from the pain with her first Disney videos (largely no kid-TV household). In the meantime, she isn't supposed to put ANY wait on her feet for two days, much less walk, which means being waited on 'hand and foot.' Fortunately, as of 9:06PM this evening, she is still asleep. I will go in at 9:30 to wake and give her a final round of pain-killers that will hopefully get her through the night.
Oh yeah, went back to MIT later to get pictures, file a report with the MIT police, and just verify what I hadn't noticed before. The metal plates were actually on both sides of the fence (extending onto the public sidewalk), and a facilities guy measured the surface temperature at 165 degrees F!!! They promptly cordoned off the entire area, but it was a little too late for my wee bairn.
...As for Luke, I have no idea who he is talking about here.
I will be a little distracted for a few days (not that my output was so huge recently anyway), as my 4-year old daughter just got 2nd degree burns on the bottom of both of her feet today. I had just brought the twins by the MIT fields to see Jim and his kid. We were there maybe 10 minutes before we decided to take off. As we get ready to leave, Catherine, who was barefoot (on grass, imagine that), starts screaming. I look over at her, and she is on her knees next to the fence separating the fields from the street. She is on a concrete footing, with metal plates on top, and a little concrete curb. I figured she had stumbled and hit her shin on the curb. I walk over to her, trying to downplay the pain, but she doesn't stop crying, and when I get to her, she tries to show me her feet. I take a look, and both sets of soles and toes look like somebody who had just gotten out of the water after 3 hours (all wrinkled up), but are also white. I immediately pick her up, and race to the car to head to the emergency room with her screaming all the way. Fortunately, Jim and company had ice packs, so I grab a couple of those and give them to her to press against her feet.
15 minutes later, park illegally in front of the Mt. Auburn Hospital emergency room (no spots) and race inside with the kids. Standing at the check-in desk with a child continually screaming "I burned my feet, I burned my feet." As you can imagine, they don't make us wait for more than 3 minutes before they bring us in to triage (and only because they had to page a nurse), and then immediately bring us into a room. Doctor comes in, takes one look at her still bare feet, which by this time have completely swollen into HUGE blisters, and decrees 2nd degree burns. Wipe-down, bacitracin, tylenol-codeine (and needing to know precise weight for the kid, so that they could figure out an appropriate dose of the hard stuff), wife shows up after hurriedly driving over from the house. Also, Catherine has burned the fingers of both hands, she says from grabbing her feet after(! there were blisters on her fingers...), so they end up putting dressings on both feet and both hands. We walk out of the hospital carrying our little mummy, bring her to the house, and promptly lay her down on the couch in front of the TV to try and distract her from the pain with her first Disney videos (largely no kid-TV household). In the meantime, she isn't supposed to put ANY wait on her feet for two days, much less walk, which means being waited on 'hand and foot.' Fortunately, as of 9:06PM this evening, she is still asleep. I will go in at 9:30 to wake and give her a final round of pain-killers that will hopefully get her through the night.
Oh yeah, went back to MIT later to get pictures, file a report with the MIT police, and just verify what I hadn't noticed before. The metal plates were actually on both sides of the fence (extending onto the public sidewalk), and a facilities guy measured the surface temperature at 165 degrees F!!! They promptly cordoned off the entire area, but it was a little too late for my wee bairn.
...As for Luke, I have no idea who he is talking about here.
posted by Alex de Frondeville at 9:10 PM
1 Comments:
I thought that at first (except it was cloudy at that point) and didn't pay attention before running off to the hospital. But Jim mentioned that he thought it was from underground heating, and when I went back there were steam vents venting steam at either end of the sidewalk, and you could see steam coming out between the seams of the metal. Apparently it was a steam leak according to the MIT facilities guy. So we're keeping our options open. Definitely a very dangerous situation.
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