It Seemed like A Good Idea At the Time.

One thing I'd like to point out to anyone reading this: I'm writing about an incident that happened in Summer of 1978. Had my parents been raising us in today's environment, I would not have been allowed the freedom I had as a kid. Parents of today, even in that small town, can't trust that their neighbors aren't a danger to their kids. Back then, my parents knew everyone within a certain radius of their house, and that was my roaming radius. In 2005, when my son was the same age I was in 1978, his roaming radius was the back yard, and he got checked on frequently. He's ten now, and we live in the Dayton, Ohio Metro area. He's not allowed to walk to the dollar store 200 yards from our apartment unless he has me, his father, or his one of teenage stepsisters with him. Sad, but that's the way it has to be in today's environment.
Now... on to another of my nutty childhood memories.

It Seemed like A Good Idea At the Time.

Of course, at the time, I was six  years old. Lots of things seem like good ideas to a six -year-old. They have not yet developed a healthy sense of mortality, or even cause and effect. When it comes to the possible results satisfying their curiosity, six-year-olds will often act first and ask questions later.

That is exactly what I did in this instance.

I'd been at a friend's house. She lived near my house, but not too near. I did have to cross one street to get there. If I took the "short cut," (which was exactly the same distance as what I thought of as the "long" way) I crossed two streets, one of which almost never had any traffic because it T-intersected with my street. That way allowed me to walk down the alley of my block.
Our visit had been cut short by the fact that her family had to go somewhere, so I walked back home, taking the short cut.

As I approached my parents' driveway, I saw that someone had dumped charcoal on the ground in the grassy area near our trash cans. When we had a cookout, if Dad had been able to light the charcoal without a bunch of lighter fluid, he would dump the ash on the cement area after it had cooled, adding it to Mom's compost, but he had never put the ash here before.
Thinking it odd to come home from such a short visit and find dumped charcoal and ash, I began to wonder a few things. Had Dad fired up the grill while I was gone? It had just been him and Adam at home... Mom was out, and I'd been at my friend's house. I looked at the grill, but there were no clues there. It was a grill... it pretty much always looked the same when not in use. I touched the grill. It wasn't hot. It was warm, but it was also sitting outside in the ninety-degree heat and sunlight.
Again, I looked at the coals. They weren't smoking. I wondered... were they hot?

Thinking that there was only one way to find out, I took off my sandal and slowly reached out with my toes, intending to barely touch the coals.

Being a six-year-old, I did not take into account the way meat is cooked over charcoal. I certainly didn't think of my flesh as meat... such a concept is beyond the scope of a little kid's logic.
So... I didn't expect the heat to affect me until my toes actually touched the coal. Of course, I never got that far.

With my skin still inches away from the coals, I suddenly felt a searing pain across and between my toes, all over the ball of my foot, and up the side of my arch. A sizzling sound accompanied the sensation, and I smelled something not unlike frying bacon.

Yup... the coals were hot.

"Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!"

Jerking my foot back and screaming like a cartoon factory whistle, I hopped around on the other foot, trying to get out of the stone-covered driveway so I could sit down. When I reached the sidewalk that led to our back door, I plopped onto the ground, still screaming, and turned my foot up on my other leg (sitting half in the "Indian style" position) so that I could see how burned it was. Realizing that testing the coals with my toes had been a really stupid idea, I was now trying to figure out what, if anything, to tell my Dad. I was sure I was going to get into trouble for this! If it wasn't too burned, I'd sneak into the house, put burn cream on it, and not tell anyone.
The bacon-y smell was stronger as soon as I brought the bottom of my foot closer to my face. Part of it was literally charred. The skin which had, before the burn, been calloused from walking barefoot on pretty much every outdoor surface I could find, was now blackened and crisp. Some of it was hanging off. The skin which had still been soft and peachy was now "bad sunburn" red. Some of it had little water blisters. As I watched, those got bigger, a few attaining the size of flea bites (or, on a normal person, mosquito bites). Simultaneously, I realized that I was hungry for bacon, and that the smell was coming from my foot. I had char-broiled my own flesh. Hey I was a pretty good cook!
Knowing that the smell was coming from my foot didn't make me stop wanting bacon. My only excuse is that I grew up playing mostly with boys...
At the same time, my little brother approached and asked if I wanted him to get Dad.

No way! I shook my head vigorously.
I did not want him to get Dad... this was pretty bad, and I was sure he was going to be mad at me. I was going to get the "think first" speech... again. Adam didn't look too sure, and I thought he might tell Dad anyway. Before he got the chance to make that decision, a pretty big one for a four-year-old, the friend I did not know was visiting my father came outside to go home. Seeing me sitting on the sidewalk, clutching my foot and howling, he went right back into the house. Through the door, I could hear him talking to my Dad.
"You might want to check on your daughter... she's sitting in front of the house, holding onto her foot and shrieking like a couple of fighting cats... could be a bee sting."
I wished! Bee stings didn't hurt this much.

Dad came out. He took one look at me, and his face exploded. His jaw hit the ground, eyes popping as his eyebrows reached for the sky. I don't know what was worse... the nerve-stripping sound I was projecting throughout the yard, or the shock of seeing his daughter's foot so resemble well-done steak. Lifting me off of the sidewalk, he ran with me into the house, where he plunked me down onto a kitchen chair so he could survey the damage.
Because he did not know first aid for burns, he first put butter on the area. Initially, that felt good, because the butter came out of the refrigerator, but after it warmed up on my foot, it seemed to make the problem worse. By that time, Dad was on the phone with whatever household Mom had gone to visit. As soon as he informed her of the situation, she told him to put my foot in ice water, instead, and that she was coming home. The water felt great on my foot. Oddly, the heat of the burn was so great that the butter, still melted on my skin, all came off in the ice water and turned into little waxy ribbons of fluff. Along with it, it took big but thin flecks of blackened skin, or maybe those came off on their own. It wasn't until the foot was soaking, and I had calmed down, that Dad finally got around to questioning me about the event. I'd begun to hope he wouldn't do that... I didn't want to admit to him what I'd done.

My father never accepted "I dunno" for an answer. Instead, he used his most insidious, unbeatable parenting tool:
Logic.
"Well, your foot didn't spontaneously combust. What happened?"
Crap. He had all ready pulled out the big words. I wasn't getting out of answering this.
No amount of fidgeting, "um"-ing, or sniffling and looking pitiful would do. An explanation was demanded, and I was expected to provide it. I had to admit that I'd tested the coals in the driveway with my toes. He looked confused by my answer.
"What coals?"
Dad didn't know there were coals there? Who dumped in our driveway?
"...by the alley," I explained.
"You found charcoal sitting by the alley, didn't know where it came from, or how hot it was, and you stuck your foot in it?"

When he said it like that, it didn't sound like much of a good idea any more. I nodded, expecting that this was the opening to the speech I'd heard enough to memorize. It usually started with some variation on "didn't you think about (fill in the blank) before you (insert stupid choice here)?" which had a pretty obvious answer, considering that I had once again done something to trigger the speech's delivery. I got that speech a lot.
Instead, Dad had a different take on the subject.
"Well," he said, shaking his head at me. "You won't do that again, will you?"
No, I thought, shaking my head. It was a tough way to learn that lesson, but it was a lesson learned. Don't use your body as a test subject to answer questions if the answer might be something painful. Of course, that did not stop me from all future painful lessons. I still had to learn not to assume that an object isn't a thing that will hurt me. (That story is HERE.)

Mom arrived home within minutes, but it seemed like hours. I didn't want to keep my foot in ice... the cold hurt as much as the burn if I kept it in there for too long, but when I took it out for more than a minute, the burn began to hurt again. By that time, I'd realized that Dad wasn't going to punish me for having done something stupid. Mom, on the other hand, did, though she didn't mean it that way.
Looking at the charred, blackened skin where my callouses used to be, she said, "Oh, Hannah..." then drew me into a tight hug. When she pulled back, there were tears in her eyes. My mom wasn't the kind of person who cried much. Seeing that was worse than feeling the burn. (I think she figured that out, too, because she used it on me thirteen years later when I got pulled over for speeding... and it worked.)

Mom and Dad got a neighbor to babysit Adam, and took me to the hospital, where a doctor looked at my foot. After assessing the injury, he gave me two shots and two prescriptions, then cleaned off the burn. The worst of it had been on my calloused areas. I hadn't felt the skin there burning because it was dead. It wasn't until the heat had begun to cook my healthy skin that I'd jerked my foot away.
A lot of the blackened skin, having soaked up the water I'd had it in at home, just fell off in the doctor's hands without causing me any pain at all. Still, every time he touched my foot, it hurt somewhere. Surrounding the charred callouses was a nice red border that was still perfectly sensitive. I held my breath a lot, but I still ended up yelling "OW" several times.
I later learned that one of the shots was an antibiotic, and the other was for pain. The prescriptions were for a cream to go on my foot, and pain pills I could take at night so I could sleep. I think they were Tylenol 3... I was not yet allergic to those... but I am not sure.

After treating me, The doctor sat down on a stool facing me and pretended, after he'd stuck me with needles, that he was my friend, and that the "accident" had happened to both of us.
"So... how did we get our foot burned?"
We? I was only six years old, but I was smart enough to see through the facade. Why was the doctor suddenly being so friendly? Was I in trouble?
"Is your foot burned too?" I asked, giving him my best wide-eyed-innocent-little-girl stare.
I could fool the doctor, but there were two other people in the room who knew me really, really well. "Hannah, answer him." Mom's voice was stern, kind, and tense all at once.
She looked relaxed, but she wasn't. Something was wrong. I didn't know what it was, but I could tell there was a problem related to my foot, the doctor, and his questions. I decided that a simple answer was, in this instance, not the best kind.
I told him about coming up the alley and finding the charcoal. I described how I decided to stick my foot in it, and how it had burned. I left out the part about not telling my Dad, skipping right to the part about being discovered on the sidewalk, Dad coming to get me, and my foot going into the ice water.
For a moment the doctor was quiet. Then, he asked me if I was telling him the truth.
That made me angry. I looked at him with my most outraged, chubby-cheeked little six-year-old frown and said, in my most serious, righteously indignant little six-year-old voice, "I am not a liar." Why would I tell the doctor a lie about how I had gotten injured?
"You put your own foot in the charcoal?"
Was the doctor stupid, or just deaf?
"Yes," I answered impatiently. "I just told you that."
My parents looked a little miffed, but they just sat there. There was apparently something that everyone else in the room knew, but I didn't. I didn't like that.
"...and nobody helped you do it?"
I looked at the doctor. He couldn't be a dummy... I knew you had to be smart to be a doctor because my Grandma was a nurse, and she told me so. Why was he pretending to be dumb? Why was he asking me a bunch of stupid questions when I just wanted to go home?
"I'm old enough to do things myself." I crossed my arms and narrowed my eyes at him. "I'm not a little kid."

Still not finished, the doctor decided to go the route of all adults questioning children, and ask the one that almost never gets a straight answer:
"Why did you do that?"
I was willing to put up with this from my parents. They were entitled to lecture, question, scold, etc., because they were my bosses. This guy wasn't the boss of me. He wasn't even my doctor. There was something going on here that no one was telling me. My foot still hurt, and the shot was making me feel funny. I wanted to go home and take a nap, and this guy was keeping me here just to ask me a bunch of questions I'd all ready answered to my parents. I didn't want to answer that one, because the answer made me feel foolish for having not thought of the possibility of getting burned before I decided to test the charcoal with my toes.
"I wanted to see if it was hot." My voice carried all of the annoyance an injured, tired, cranky child could express without mouthing off.
Suddenly, it seemed as if the air in the room had lost weight. The doctor relaxed, my parents relaxed, and I still had no idea what was going on.
The doctor stopped questioning me, but he couldn't resist adding insult to injury.
"Well, I bet you won't do that again, will you?"

Instantly, Mom slipped her hand into mine, a silent reminder to mind my mouth. (Don't bother, folks... it only works a parent does it!) They apparently decided to get their angry kid out of the ER, before I demonstrated my extended vocabulary for the nice doctor. (No, not that vocabulary... but it was still extended. I wouldn't start school until that fall, but I'd been reading for two years all ready, and I also hung out with a good, but tough bunch of kids. I knew a lot of perfectly clean ways to tell people off really well. Okay, so adding "butt-cheese" and "turd-burger" to the tirade might not sound so clean to a six-year-old, but at least they weren't curses.)
Dad thanked the doctor for his help and got my discharge papers.
At home, mom had me spend the rest of the day on the couch. I dozed off and on. When I was awake, she had me drinking as much fluid as possible. I felt like a water balloon. Trips to the bathroom weren't fun, and they were frequent. I could walk on the heel of the burned foot without hurting, so no one had to carry me, but the pain medicine made me loopy, so I had to go slow. That sucked, but in order to encourage fluids, mom had gotten me Popsicles, and she was allowing me some pop, so I didn't mind too much.

That night, mom wrapped my burn cream covered, bandaged burn in a bag of ice, then secured that  with towels. By the time she was done, the mass at the bottom of my leg was bigger around than my belly, but it felt nice to have the cold on my burn. The ice melted in the night. The bags leaked a little, and my foot was wet from it, but Mom had so many towels around it that no water made it to the mattress or blankets. In the morning, the skin looked a lot better. The burn was still there, and still sore, but the redness was mostly gone. All of the third degree burn, which had fortunately been limited to skin that was all ready dead, had come off. New, pink, healthy skin peeked out from underneath. Only the blistered area still hurt, and that pain was pretty mild. The blisters themselves were gone, the remaining little bit of still-sore red skin being the only sign left that I'd been burned at all.
I still spent that day indoors, and Mom still made me keep drinking all day. The second night, she did the ice pack thing again. By day three, my burn was barely even noticeable. We were supposed to follow up with our family doctor, but by the time our appointment came up on that third day, there wasn't much for her to check. She asked if Mom was sure the burn had been that bad. Mom had kept a couple of the black flakes that had been the skin on the ball of my foot. After some discussion, our doctor told Mom she'd never seen a third degree burn heal this fast, that my thickened callouses must have taken the brunt of the heat, and that encouraging (I'd call it forcing, but they didn't ask me) fluids and using ice at night must have really sped up the healing process. And, of course, she said the same thing to me that the other adults had said...
"Bet you won't do that again, will you?"

Grown-ups, I thought. Sheesh!