You Patient Readers!

I have no idea what possessed me to post not one but two enormously long passages about old health adventures. Yet you folks waded through them like soldiers, never complaining once. I salute you.

And will I reward your patience with some nice happy flower pix? I was gonna. I really was.

I will, too. Of course.

But first? Well...I got another bad boo-boo, and where best to indulge myself talking about it but here?

The point of this story isn't so much about the burn, but about the egg whites.

Last Saturday night, after working in the yard much of the day, I treated myself to some Lotus Chinese Kitchen. Since I like my food literally boiling hot - I can eat it that way without burning the inside of my mouth, but not touch it without burning my fingers - I nuked the won ton soup before bringing it to my perennial perch in the home office. When I'm not gardening or going to Sam's, I spend my waking hours here. I sit here to eat, too, with feet elevated as usual on their special chair, and a big pillow on my lap to hold my dinner.

Well, just as I'd settled in with my boiling soup...I dropped it. It hit my upper chest and ran down between my breasts and over the top of my belly.

With (for me) extreme speed, I got up and shed the rest of the soup off me, ran into the shower for a cold water rinse, then ran into the kitchen and separated three eggs. Pretty Lady and the egg white cure was thrumming in my mind. The burned patch is large, around 8" x 6". I grabbed a paper towel to sop up the egg whites, then lay it over the burn.

This was obviously a bad burn. I was clearly in shock, trembling, palpitations, surely low BP, all the classic symptoms. I had to consider the ER, but of course that's to be avoided if possible.

And what the egg whites did to keep me out of the ER was phenomenal.

It was the only thing that stopped the pain. Ice didn't do it. All my drugs didn't do it - and that's certainly saying something, there.

Knowing it was a second-degree burn and that I needed to monitor the shock, I stayed up until around 6 the next morning, when the shakes and palpitations finally quieted. I told Walter so he'd know. He scolded me, but he did understand this one came not from carelessness (like not wearing the mask), but innocent-enough clumsiness.

I sat in my chair as usual, feet propped high like you'd do anyway for shock, drinking lots of fluids like always, some salty food, Lotus with extra soy sauce...The shockiness didn't fade for many hours. I kept the paper towel soaked in egg whites on the burn, anchoring it down with an ice pack I usually use in my cooler.

The ice pack was nice. But I tell you this: the difference the egg whites made in that burn is extraordinary. By 6 am, I could leave the soaked paper towels off for several minutes and feel no pain at all. The redness was much less than it should have been. The loss of skin was too.

Just amazing. Really stunning, to me. I have some experience with bad burns. One came from pouring boiling oil over the back of my left hand when I was around 13, miscalculating while pulling the stopper out of the sink. That burn was so bad that the tendons in that hand are slightly but permanently damaged as a result. Over the years, a good dose of cooking burns, and one from melting old paint to strip it, followed.

MRSA adores two things: burns, and a channel. Walter's seen what happens when I get burned, how the MRSA sets in within minutes and grows rapidfire. So any burn is a source of horror for him.

Being able to tell him what the egg whites were doing probably kept him able to continue driving that night. He told me it was a treatment he'd heard of as a child in the old country, and because they didn't have refrigeration, he thought it wasn't simply because the egg whites were cold. I agree, completely, although of course the initial cold was soothing.

Now the blisters are breaking and the skin's coming off in large patches. MRSA has gotten into part of it, but only a small area so far. I have very good reason to believe that without the egg whites, this would be far more serious than it is.

Waiting for it to heal, trying to stay out of the yard and Sam's and therefore out of trouble, I've been sleeping and sleeping. Unanswered comments and emails are littering my trail, and all I'm good for is sleep...