It’s been a week since I curled up on the sofa with a magazine and poured an entire pot’s worth of scalding hot coffee in my lap. I spent the rest of my Sunday morning in A&E and later in the urgent-care unit having my bubbling skin ‘de-roofed’. Since there doesn’t appear to be any nerve damage (it hurts like hell) the doctors and nurses don’t appear to be very concerned. Having grown up with an ICU nurse in the family, I know how hard it is to get sympathy from people that work in emergency: unless you’ve been hit by lightning, you’re not going to get one iota.
Not that I deserve any, it’s not like I was doing anything noble, like saving children from a burning building—I had simply trusted my massive American-made-for truckers and soccer-moms tumbler of coffee to stay put on the nearby radiator while I turned a magazine page. As a friend from high school pointed out, I shouldn’t have trusted a tumbler to do anything less than…well, TUMBLE.
The sheer shame of doing something so stupid is intense and I am having trouble shaking it off. It feels like a moral failure, perhaps I need it to be in order to move on. I asked the nurse if the emergency room is busier on a full-moon. She said she’d just been discussing that with another nurse and they both agreed some of the cases seem stranger than usual but couldn’t say for sure. The moon was a waxing crescent phase the night before.
I was impressed with how the doctors and nurses passed no judgement on the reasons for my burns; they spoke of it the way I would getting a paper cut shuffling cards—a freak but benign accident unlikely to happen again anytime soon. I sensed much worse can and does happen on a daily basis with no rhyme or reason in A&E and my case was a nice break for them from a string of true tragedies. The only bollocking I got was from the nurse, ‘Now don’t go out and buy a bunch of expensive anti-scarring creams! They aren’t proven to work any better than the cheap stuff. Besides, it’s massage that really gets collagen working.’ I hadn’t thought about anti-scar creams until she mentioned it. If the burns do scar, I kinda hope the scars form into a cool shape, then I might feel a little less stupid.