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Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Book Entry 2: 1953 Floor Furnace Burns




1953
Floor Furnace Burns

I don’t know exactly how it happened but I fell on our floor furnace.  I fell with my right leg bent and got some pretty good burns on the inside of my right calf and on the inside of my right thigh where the lower and upper leg touched when it bent.
I remember sitting on the kitchen counter by the sink.  Mom ran cold water over the leg that didn’t have the burn in an attempt to take my mind off the leg that was burned.  She rubbed butter onto her hands and then gently onto my burns.  We learned years later the theory of butter helping burns was wrong and it actually made the burns hurt and scar more. 
The next day mom got some kind of salve from the doctor to put on my leg.  I remember sitting and crying while mom tried so hard to apply that salve without making me scream.  Once they were covered with salve she bound them with long strips of gauze. 
I remember my leg hurt terribly.  Mom did everything she could to comfort me.  Dad stood by coaxing her on what to do and not to do but he was too scared to touch me.  He would gasp with my every scream.  At one point he told me to look at him.  He made funny faces to make me laugh.  When I saw he had tears in his eyes I only cried harder. 
For years I watched the scars on my legs grow as I grew.  Every summer they would look like brown tic-tac-toe marks on my tanned legs and every winter they would all but disappear.  When I was writing this I looked and couldn’t find any signs of the scars anymore.  Some time in the last thirty years they disappeared. 


2 comments:

  1. oh my gosh,, same thing happened to me in 1959 ,, I was 3,, mine have alsmost gone too,, strange that,, I'm enjoying your blog,,

    ReplyDelete
  2. Those old floor furnaces were such a cause of childhood pain. We had one in Santa Barbara right in the middle of a hall way... no escape getting around it.

    We had a few "waffle" burns on little feet, but healed quickly.

    Enjoying your journey......

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for sharing in my life's journey. If you don't leave a comment I have no way of knowing you stopped by. I do hope you enjoy reading of my life as much as I have enjoyed living it! Joyce