I suddenly found myself alight from the
waist up------the flames
roaring
about my head.
PANIC! This CANNOT be happening to ME!
I started to run, but that made the flames roar louder, I was on
steeply sloping ground covered with long grass, so I started to roll in
the grass until I found myself under the nearby house, and the flames
were licking at the floor boards, and I had to get out. I remember
thinking that I wouldn't want to burn the house down as well.
Crawling up the hill, still burning, somebody had got the garden hose
and watered me down, and kept the hose running on me, one of the main
elements of Burns First Aid, and in my case, not only putting the
putting the fire out, but the prolonged running of cool water prevented
a lot of the burns penetrating deeper and causing 3rd Degree Burns.
Bloody hell! It felt good.
By this time a fair crowd had gathered, but I wasn't really aware of
anything excepting the long treacly skeins of melted skin sliding off
my hand and arm.
The amazing thing that dawned on me THEN was, there was absolutely NO PAIN!
But by the time our family doctor got there the pain had become
horrendous, and a shot of some sort of painkiller was a godsend.
An ambulance picked me up and took me to the local hospital where they
inspected me and put a figure of 60% on my burns, with a high
percentage of 3rd Degree Burns and some 2nd Degree Burns.
They then decided that I would have to go the Royal Brisbane
Hospital immediately.
All this time I believed that, if I for one second, closed my eyes and
gave in to the almost overpowering urge to flake out, I would never
wake up. And being a fairly stubborn sort of bloke I fought that
feeling, tooth and nail.
So we took off for Brisbane, about 200K away, with a friend of mine
driving the ambulance, and a nursing sister looking after me.
To keep awake I chatted to the nurse, watched a tail-gater following us
for a really quick trip, and had a go at making my heartbeat vary
according to the monitor. It must have worked because a couple of times
the nurse got a bit concerned!
The V8 ambulance was running short of fuel and had to pull in to a
service station in Brisbane.
This was not good!--The smell of
petrol and the sound of it gurgling into the tank right under me was
just about too much for me. That should give you a clue as to what sort
of burn it was.
Well, we got to the RBH Burns Ward,
in those days it was Ward 2C, and
this young, clean cut bloke introduced himself saying, “Hi, I'm Paul”, so I said (still keeping
up the brave front) “G'day Paul, I'm Peter,
do you know where Mary is?”, and a little voice piped up
from the foot of my bed and said “I'm right
here”.
Paul then assessed my burns at 50% 3rd Degree Burns and 10% Partial
Thickness Burns
So that was my intro to Ward 2C, which was to be my home for the next 3
months.
But may require your contact Details One day,
But not just now,
So go ahead and check all the pages.
It's not all Grisly, there is some humour.