Scar Party!

Yesterday, I got a second-degree burn at work. (I made the rookie mistake of hiccuping while taking a pan of cookies out of the industrial oven.) It hurt like the devil all day, and I definitely alarmed my boss with how chill I was about the whole thing.

That’s not really a brag, (okay, it is) but it was on my forearm which isn’t really sensitive, so while it hurt like crazy, it also didn’t hurt at all compared to other burns or injuries I’d gotten. I was more fascinated by watching my skin puff up, turn a little grey at the edges, and start production on Blisters the Musical (You’ll Sing Out In Pain!) than I was upset.

Point being, she walked in to check on my progress frosting the Red Velvet cookies and instead saw me standing there with an angry skin cell riot, holding a work glove filled with cold water, like “Hi! I got burned :D”

She gave me some burn gel and I finished the rest of my shift rather uneventfully.

It’s healing up fine—there don’t seem to be any signs of infection, of prematurely popped blisters, or anything really. But the main thing is people keep telling me “I hope it doesn’t scar!” And frankly, I’m totally fine if it does. Scars are cool! Not in the “I’m so awesome and covered in battle scars” way, but more in the “here’s my proof that I’ve been doing things and using my body!” kind of way.

It’s like a little roadmap of all my funny stupid moments. It’s nice, you know? Like even if you’re an identical twin (Hi, dad) you can still end up completely different from them based on how your body gets beaten up by the universe. That’s kind of neat!

I decided, because of this, to put together a scar map and see what my adventure on Earth has been like so far.

I thought it was kinda funny. Not a “cool” scar in sight! Mostly just me being less coordinated than I thought. (Or, in the case of the cactus, too coordinated. Never should have caught that sucker.)

Anyway. All this to say that my arm is healing just fine, but I certainly won’t be mad if I get to add another scar to the roster.

Warning for anyone who doesn’t want to see something mildly bad! Burn pictures below:

This one is shortly after getting burned. You can see some grey tinge here and there, and the droplets of cold water I splashed on it from the sink.

This one is from a few minutes ago today, where the blisters are forming and it’s transforming into a much grosser visage than the initial burn.

Anyway! Don’t get burned, but celebrate your scars when you can.