A terrible burn

Sometime near the end of April, my driver showed up with his little nine month old boy, who had been severely burned three days before, because he pulled over a pot of boiling water onto himself.  I was pretty upset with him for several reasons.  First of all, he had taken my first aid class, and had been taught how to prevent this, and  to immediately put cold water on a burn, and to never spread mud on it.  Well, he had ignored all of those things, and when I saw the baby, he was covered in mud.  The second thing was that he had waited three days to come to me.  I asked him why, and here was his answer...

About 2 years ago, he came running to me, like there was a dire emergency, and asked me to come see his mother, because she was sick.  I asked what was wrong with her, and he said she has diabetes.  I said, well when did she find out (as he was so excited, I thought it must have been a new diagnosis, and the family was scared).  Turns out she had it for 20 years.  I asked if she was having any new problems with it and he said no.  From previous blogs, it is clear that I am over busy, and usually, when people have problems, I will drop everything to help them.  But at that time I was extremely busy, and it put me over the edge that he would try to manipulate me like that (he did this quite often.  When I did get to go see his mom, he tricked me into coming on a day when every woman in his family was there and I ended up having over 30 women clamoring for me to examine them).  So I reacted rather badly and told him to never do that to me again.

The second reason that he waited so long was because of an incident that happened about 2 weeks before his baby was burned.  He showed up at my front gate on a day when I was running late and did not have a guard working, and he rang my bells for over 10 minutes.  I finally went out, and talked with him through our tiny little window that we have cut out of our gate.  He said that his mother needed eye surgery at the eye hospital and since I know the administrator there, would I ple

ase call and ask how much it would cost. I said yes.

So, I made the call and of course there are different prices for all different surgeries and I had no idea which surgery she needed.  Later on, when I got to the office, I told him there were different prices and that she needed to go there and be examined to find out how much it would be.  He said that she had gone and they said it would be about $100.  I asked, "then why did you show up at my house and ask me to call?"  He laughed and said he thought I could get a lower price.  I talked with his boss that day, and told him that it was inappropriate for a man to show up at my house asking to talk to me, and to tell him to never do it again.  If he has a problem, he can call or see me at the office.

So, he didn't bring his son to me until he was dying.  At first I felt bad, but I know that I had made it clear that if there was a real need I would be there for him, so I gave up the guilt.

Back to the story.  He, his wife and their son showed up in front of K.'s house (she is the nurse that I work with) and another foreign woman happened to see them there and called me.  K. and I exam

ined him, and at first, because of all the mud, I thought that he was covered in third degree burns.  It was really bad.  He also had a fever.

We took him into the bathroom and began to scrub his wounds.  It was horrific to hear his screams, but very necessary.  WE finally got the mud cleaned off,and the dead skin.  His whole left arm and leg were burned, along with a spot on his scalp and small spots on his right hand and foot.  We covered the wounds in silvadene cream, Vaseline gauze and wrapped him all up.  We then made a plan to debride (scrub) the wound and change the dressing every three days. We also gave him some antibiotics and tylenol for infection and pain.  Thankfully, I had some narcotics with me,

and we began to give him some pain medicine about 30 minutes before we started.  After a couple of weeks though, he equated the me

dicine with what was to come, and he began to throw up the medicine as soon as we gave it.  So, we had to do with Tylenol suppositories.

The going was slow, as a matter of fact, I never got to see him completely well, because I got sick.  But I did get to see his leg heal, and his arm was healing well, though we feel that part of his arm was indeed a third degree burn.  It took 3 months to heal.

This picture was taken after about two months, when his leg was already better, but his arm still had a long way to go!