Portraits--An Update on Healing

Hi all.  We're spending the weekend inside awaiting the arrival of Hurricane Irene, so I'm finally sitting down to give a little update on my face.  It has healed so well that you can hardly tell anything ever happened.  There's just a little pinkness on my cheeks, nose, and forehead that should fade in time (could take up to a year, according to the burn surgeon).  I no longer have to put antibiotic vaseline on my face (thank goodness!)--now I get to slather on Palmer's cocoa butter.  That stuff smells so good!

 Here's a picture of me as of Wednesday, showing my new haircut as well:

Here are some other portraits that have happened around our house lately (in descending order of quality)

Andrew, after enjoying some Nutella on toast ("Do you want to know how I got these scars?"):

Andrew's first time as cameraman, today:

"Mama"

"Dada"

Self Portrait

"Bike"

We Might Be Getting a New Oven...Here's Why

So, I have a bit of an accident in the kitchen Sunday morning.  The oven in our apartment is really, really old, dating back to when one had to turn on the gas and then light it with a match because it had no pilot light.  (This must be the kind of oven that Sylvia Plath used to kill herself.)  I turned on the gas, lit a match, and went to light the oven, but the air conditioner in the kitchen blew my match out.  I almost lit another one, but started to think "oh, maybe before I turn the oven on I should decide for sure that I'm going to bake something."  I had been going back and forth between using my leftover sliced peaches from jam-making to make a peach cobbler or some sort of peach sauce for pancakes or something.  After-all, we were out of eggs and milk so our breakfast options were limited.  I started flipping through my cookbook for inspiration, etc, etc.  I finally decided to go ahead with my original peach cobbler plan, so I lit a match and put it up to the little hole in the bottom of the oven where you're supposed to light it.

Whoosh.  I immediately knew my mistake as I heard and saw the gas-filled oven completely fill with flame.  I knew that my hair was most likely on fire, so I began vigorously hitting my hair to put it out, all the while screaming over and over in order to make up everyone else in the house as well as because I was terrified at the knowledge of what I had done to myself.  Paul and Terry (my father-in-law) came running into the kitchen.  I quickly explained what had happened.  Terry ushered me to the bathroom sink to put cold water on my face while Paul pick up poor, traumatized Andrew, who had been standing on a chair at the counter waiting to help me make breakfast.  (Thank goodness Andrew is big enough now that I'm never holding him while doing any sort of work in the kitchen).  I was handed a hand towel to soak in cold water and hold onto my burning face.  After peaking at my face in the mirror, we knew that I wasn't burned terribly badly, but I probably ought to see a doctor.  Paul got a gallon ziplock bag and filled it with ice and water so I could continually re-cool my hand towel on the way to the hospital.  Terry and Paul took me to the emergency room while my mother-in-law stayed home and took care of Andrew.  (Thank goodness this happened when so many people were there to help!)

The emergency room was able to take care of me pretty quickly.  They gave me ice packs for my face and neck, and an IV with morphine.  They said I mostly had 1st degree burns, which is like a severe sunburn.  They cut my apron and my shirt off of me (Thank goodness the shirt was a cheap Old Navy clearance buy), but I had the presence of mind to ask that they please NOT cut my bra off since it's a really good Victoria's Secret bra that I waited months for the semi-annual sale to get.  I don't know whether they would have cut it off anyway, since they don't have to pull it over your head to get it off of you, but they sure looked like they were being cavalier with those scissors!  I told them the pain was about a 4 on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the most pain you've ever been in, since I've had a baby, afteralll.  One of the nurses said "I hear that!"  I'm surprisingly funny, and extra candid, when I'm in painful, emergency situations.  You should have heard me when I was in labor.  Oh yes, after settling me in at the emergency room and ensuring that I was ok, Paul had to go home so he could drive Terry and Emma to the airport to return to their home.  Our good friend Varnali came to the hospital to keep me company while Paul was gone.

So, my face is healing now.  It's kind of in the "worse before it gets better" stage, I think, because lots of it is stiff and crusty and hurts when it peels or cracks.  I'm to keep antibacterial goop on it 24/7, so it's really greasy and shiny.  I'm hoping I'll be over the hump in terms of recovery after tomorrow.  I've been to a follow-up appointment at a burn care clinic, and I'll be going there again next Tuesday.  The doctor there confirmed that my face will make a full recovery.  A very kind friend in our ward watched Andrew for me during the appointment yesterday and even made a dinner for us.  (Thank you, Elyse!

I guess I can't write this post without including a picture, so here are a couple.  The first one is the day after the incident, and the second one I took just now.  Can see that I don't have any eyebrows?  My eyelashes are about half their usual length.  I'm keeping my hair back so it doesn't get stuck to my goopy face and neck.  Once my face gets better, I'm going to need a haircut.  There are seeming random spots throughout my hair that are a coarser texture because they got singed.  I've brushed and washed out all of the really yucky blackened burned hair.  Boy, was it stinky.  I do have almost all my hair intact, though, so I've very thankful for that.  All-in-all I have much to be thankful for and I'm going to be just fine.  By the way, about 4 hours after returning from the emergency room I got right back on the horse and baked the peach crisp.  And, our landlord's handyman came over today to see what it will take to replace our oven and stove.

Amazing

This afternoon, after writing the previous post all about the things in our household that have broken lately, I came across the below video on a friend's blog post from a year ago.  Talk about making my problems seem insignificant!  Check it out.  You can read this woman's blog here.

Things Fall Apart

I don't remember any of the plot of the book Things Fall Apart from high school English class, but the theme of entropy sure seems applicable to our household this week.

Everything in the bathroom is broken.  The Friday before last, just in time for guests to arrive on Saturday, our washer/dryer stopped drying clothes.  We've had the repair guy out to look at it twice and it's still broken!  He insists that nothing seems to be wrong with it.  Argghh.  This morning I set up the washer drain hose to drain into the bathtub to try to fix the problem.  I get a knock on my door just before lunch from my downstairs neighbor saying he has water leaking down the walls in his bathroom.  The drain hose had fallen out of the tub and there was water all over the bathroom floor.  Now every bath towel in the house is wet and on the floor.  I assured him that it was a one-time flooding event, unlike Thursday last week when he told me that he had had water leaking through his bathroom ceiling for the past few days.  Apparently all the bits of grout that have been chipping off from around the ancient bathroom tiles in our shower were the only things keeping water from seeping into the wall.  Then about two hours later the built-in washcloth holder in the shower came out completely, leaving a big gaping hole.  I guess the grout around it was in worse shape than I thought.  Oh, and one of the bathroom towel racks was broken from Andrew hanging on it, but we've fixed that now.

Another fitting title from literature for the past week could be "water, water everywhere."  Yesterday I was in our bedroom folding laundry and I noticed water dripping down the front of the window air conditioner.  I thought maybe rain was leaking in between the window and the a/c unit, which we just installed last week.  No, the rain was actually leaking in the cracks around the wooden window frame at the very top of the window.  Outside, water was pouring down between the rain gutter and the side of the house.  I looked down, and saw that there was also water literally streaming in from the electrical outlet in the wall.  Who knew you could have flooding in a second story apartment?  I had to laugh because a few months ago the shelves we had mounted on that wall came crashing down in the middle of the night.  Paul felt the plaster in the big holes that were left in the wall and he said he could tell the plaster was wet.  It had been raining hard and the rain gutter was broken but the handyman hadn't come to fix it yet.  When the handyman finally came and I told him that we thought the shelves came down because water soaked through the wall he said that couldn't be the case because if there was enough water in the wall to soften the plaster like that then there would also be water coming in through the electrical outlet box.  Well, now there is.  Thankfully we didn't re-mount those shelves onto that wall.  When the handyman came to look at it yesterday, he said the problem may be caused by a gap that's developed between the chimney and the house.  Oh, I'm so glad I don't own this house!

The cherry on top was when Paul's x-box 360 suddenly got the "red ring of death" (aka broke) Monday night after he had taken a day off work and spent the whole day building a contraption to enable him to play a driving game while sitting in the nintendo chair like it's the driving seat of a car.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Is that enough complaining?  I think I'm done now.