The Setup
What seems like a million years ago, but was really only about twenty years, I was married and had four kids. Our first house was quite small, and the challenges of six people living in close quarters, with one bathroom, were doable if everyone cooperated. That happened about five or ten minutes out of a month.
When my son was just a new hatchling, I stayed home from work for a bit to try out the Mr. Mom thing. It sucked some thing fierce, my God what a horrible job that is. Give me freezing sideways rain, a chainsaw and an angry rabid bear any day. Four kids, from new born and toddler to pre-teen in a thousand square feet ....good fucking luck with your sanity.
I developed a strategy for getting a bit of "me time" ( cue the "Oprah Show" and a commercial for General Foods International Coffees )
The plan, and it was a good one, went like this. Set the alarm for four a.m. and get up quietly and have the house to myself for a few hours. This was time for reading, drinking coffee and watching movies ( with a head set ) It worked perfectly, I got the time I needed to decompress, before a new day of riot control.
One winter morning, I get up as usual and stumble into the kitchen. This morning I'm going to make tea instead of coffee. I do this sometimes when I start to overdose on the dark caffeinated jolt juice. I had a movie from the rental store (VHS tape ) all picked out ( To Live and Die in L.A. ), make some toast and we're off. My cup of choice that morning was a double walled stainless steel cup that I used for climbing trips. It was kind of a favorite at the time. I boiled some water, made the tea and put the cup on the window ledge behind the couch. Back in the kitchen, prepped the toast, swung by the VCR to start the movie.
On approaching the couch, rather than gracefully "sitting" down, I just kind of dropped on to it. Plunked as it were. Turns out, I shouldn't have done that.
The Burn
My two hundred pounds hit the couch, the couch hit the wall, and that caused the boiling hot tea cup to launch into the air off the window sill . The freshly boiled brew landed right dead center on my lap. My lap to be precise is only covered in light track pants with no underwear.
Instant and shocking levels of pain. Without thought, I leap off the couch and scream like never before. The scream comes from outside my body, I can hear it, but it sounds like someone else is crying out in pain.
I've just dropped boiling tea on to my basically unprotected penis. That's not good.
After standing bolt upright, I involuntarily drop to the floor clutching my beloved parts. Fetal position, moaning loudly, cupping my parts. My penis feels like someone poured gas on in it and lit it. Bad Pain. Not going to be walking this one off anytime soon....Ooooooh No. Not this time.
Desperate for relief, I scurry down the hall to the shower and turn it on full blast cold, directly on the scalded member. I'm making uncontrollable lost kitten noises, my wife calls in " Are you OK?"
"No, I don't think so, I just burned my dick"
Likely not the answer she was expecting .
"I just spilled boiling hot tea on my dick, It's not looking good"
Not looking good?...in fact when I withdrew from the cold water stream and checked out the injured party, it was visibly blistering and shedding skin layers right before my eyes. Not comforting, not what a person wants to see. It was impossible to survive without the cold water running directly on to the burned area. Even ten seconds away from it was too much to bear. Literally intolerable levels of pain.
I stayed under the shower stream, with my feet getting numb from the cold. Every few minutes trying to ween myself off the cold water treatment, no luck. After fifteen minutes, no change, just unrelenting and total pain.
Shit Shit Shit...and a fuck for good measure.
I'm going to have to go to the hospital emergency room with a burnt penis.
I live in a small town, the chances of doing this anonymously is ....well, actually about zero.
The first order of business is pain control, I can't leave the cold shower with out collapsing into a writhing bundle on the floor. Desperate times....
I make up an ice pack wrapped in towels to provide the chill factor. Great idea but it doesn't last long enough to even get me out the door before warming up and letting the pain surge back. I robbed the freezer of all the frozen goodies and cold packs, whatever was wrapped and frozen. I used a thin towel for a buffer and put the frozen goods down my pants. I packed the extras into a small lunch cooler and set out on the drive to the emergency room.My very unimpressed wife wished me luck and watched me disappear down the driveway. Along the way I had to pull over once to reload the cold pack and get the pain down to a just about tolerable level. No idea what that must have looked like to people driving by.
At the hospital parking lot, I had to reload the cold one more time before heading in.
Sechelt BC at five a.m. and there's two people in the waiting room, and I know them both.
"Hi Mike, what are you doing here?"
Not wanting to share the horror right at that moment I found some way to sidestep the question and find something else to talk about.
The cold is wearing off, and the pain is coming on full tilt.
I'm trying to remain civil, but that's not going to last long.
I ask the admitting nurse which doctor is on. There's two she replies, one I know very well and is actually a friend. I ask if I can see him.
Of course she asks what the problem is. She waits for my answer, pen at the ready, hovering above the page. An uncomfortable amount of time passes with complete silence. I lean in close and whisper, "I scalded my penis with hot tea" The poor girl recoiled back and made a sour milk face, before gathering herself and making a few notes.
It took way, way too long for the doc to come strolling around the corner. He's all happy, almost jaunty.
" Michael , what's up, what brings you in at this hour?"
We are still in the waiting area and all ears in the place want know the answer to that question.
Let's go inside and I'll tell you.
I give him a brief overview, and ultimately it comes time to drop the pants.
By this time the burn has had time to really set itself good. Peeling layers of skin, red, raw and swollen ( not the good kind of swollen, but the "Oh my god that can't be right" kind of swollen. My friend and doctor, the total pro that he is, leans back and says way too loud, "Oh my that's awful, oh that just terrible, I've never seen anything like that."
"Oh my we're going to have to treat that"
You think doc?, I didn't go to med school but I was thinking along the same lines as you.
My lovely friend and doctor eases me into another room and goes to find an emergency room nurse. I lay back on the gurney clutching my parts and trying to think away the pain.
My doctor returns with a nurse and another doctor. I can hear them coming down the hall talking.
"You should see what Mike did this time, come and have a look". So there I lie for all the world to see as two doctors and a nurse examine the damage. The docs couldn't contain their sympathy pains and made very all kinds of comments related to "Glad that's not me"
As it turns out, I have second degree burns on my penis and an eye-watering amount of pain. The doctors leave me with the nurse. I can hear them gong away. "Oh man did you see that? holy shit, that's awful."
Ha Ha Ha, very funny monkey boys.
The nurse goes about her business, gives me a couple of high performance pain pills, and sets to the job of cleaning and treating the burn.
I'm flat on my back, totally exposed, being handled by a complete stranger. I just didn't care, I just wanted two things. One, make the pain go away. Two, please God, let me make a complete recovery, no lasting damage, no scars, Pleeease!
My favorite part. ( of the story that is ...)
The nurse goes to the fridge and comes back with a burn cream called "Flamazine". I don't know why, but I find that name hilarious. Flamazine.
"When the flames are out, reach for Flamazine".
Without hesitation, or even whispering sweet nothings, my nurse lifts up my penis and starts applying Flamazine with a tongue depressor. I'm not really believing what I'm watching. One that I'm in a emergency room with a burnt penis and number two that a nurse is applying burn cream with a stick to the same burnt penis.
Right at the perfect moment of Flamazine application and nurse action, a courier bursts through the curtain. His head down looking at his clipboard, saying, "I'm going to need a signature for this"
And then he looks up.
His eyes go straight to the nurse/penis action.
He looks at me. He looks at her.
"I'm sorry, I'll come back later"
Maybe it was the pain pills kicking in, maybe it was just surrendering to the situation, I said to him. "Come on in, everyone else has been in for a look, you might as well join in too"
He made half a turn to leave and then reconsidered. He asked the nurse if she would sign for the delivery. Taking a moment away from applying the cold and oh so soothing Flamazine to my penis, she pulled off a glove and signed. The poor guy didn't know where to look or what he had stumbled in on, but he was in one fuck of a hurry to push back through that curtain and get the hell out of there. I wonder what he told his friends at beer night after that?
The nurse re-gloved and went back to work, finishing with a wrap of gauze and an cold pack.
The good doctor arranged for me to take home a tube of Flamazine and said the magic words, "OK then Michael you take good care of that now".
Actually I was thinking of traveling to a South American fungus infected jungle and running around naked for a week just to see what would happen.
It's my penis for Christ's sake of course I'm going to take care of it.
The quick ending.
Yes, It healed perfectly
All jokes aside, the Flamazine cream worked miracles
You wouldn't believe how careful I am when I put down a hot drink these days
No, I never hooked up with the nurse.
No, there are no pictures with this story
Yes, many years later , I ended up in the emergency room with another penis injury.
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