Burn Injury Resource Center
In late January in a small town in Illinois, a mother and father helped to minimize the injury to their nine-year-old daughter from a burn accident, by knowing what to do and acting quickly.
What would you do if your child got scalded by boiling hot water, or if you saw a restaurant worker scalded by hot liquid or food? Doctors say this is something that parents and restaurants employees alike should know, because these scalding accidents happens a lot.
The young girl in this case did sustain second degree burns and third degree burns, and was still in considerable plain a few weeks after the burn accident. But without her parents’ fast actions, the girl probably would have had much worse injuries–which could have required skin graft surgery to repair damaged skin.
The girl was eating with her family at a restaurant when a pot of steaming hot water for tea that was placed on the table turned over. When the boiling water spilled into the girl’s lap, it burned right through her clothes and skin to the inner layers of the dermis, where nerves and blood vessels are. “I started to feel like I was on fire, and I just started to scream,” the girl said afterward.
First, the girl’s parents pulled her pants off to cool her down. “I didn’t care that we were in the middle of a restaurant–they had to come off,” said her father. “At that point, though, I could already feel some of the skin blistering.”
Her mother, a nurse, ran to the kitchen and grabbed ice and cold water. “I grabbed an iced tea pitcher and filled it with water, and sat her down with the ice and held her and poured the ice and the water, continually dumping some of it into her lap,” the mother said. “You have to stop the burning process. Even though the top layer of skin could be dry, the burning is still going in the skin layers below. If you can stop that deeper burning, you can stop a lot of the injury damage.”
The girl’s doctor at the burn center at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, IL said that was good thinking. “To try to cool down a burn injury is important. Particularly when a victim has clothing that has hot liquid on it, that heat is still transferring heat to the skin,” he said.
A few weeks later, the girl is well enough to play board games to ease her pain. “It makes me forget that I got burned,” she says. In addition, some virtual reality video games have been proven to help burn victims lessen their pain by taking their minds of of their burn injuries for minutes or hours at a time, even when pain medication does not help.
The girl’s doctor says that 40 percent of Loyola’s burn unit patients are children. Most of them were burned with hot water or food. This is why parents must know what to do in the event their child suffers a burn accident, and why restaurant workers should know as well.
If you or someone you know suffers an injury such as third degree burns or smoke inhalation, you should call Kramer & Pollack LLP in Mineola, New York so that the personal injury attorneys in that firm can determine whether another party has legal liability for injuries suffered, and if the injured party has a strong legal case.