Vanessence: Burn Unit

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Burn Unit

Have you ever been burned before? I mean like the kitchen burns, the kind you get when you’re cooking. Not major burns, but still painful. That happened to me night before last. I was making soap, and afterward was wiping off the stove. I picked up the grate to wipe under it and it was cool. Then I accidently bumped the burner disk – that ceramic disk that distributes the flames on a gas stove, and out of reflex I grabbed it to keep it from falling. It was in my mind that the grate over it had been cool to the touch and I just wasn’t thinking. Of course, immediate blisters. “Oh, that’s gonna leave a mark!” I said out loud when it happened.

I ran my fingers under cold water right away, but I was busy in the kitchen and debated going to get band-aids, knowing they’d come off quickly while I was washing dishes. For some reason – probably because I’d been making soap earlier, the story of the one they call “The father of aromatherapy” went though my head, and I grabbed my bottle of lavender essential oil. I sprinkled several drops over the blisters and then held an ice cube over them for a while, like I always do when I get a burn like that. After that, band-aids. I wasn’t sure what would happen, if anything. I mean, you hear things, you read things, and you think, “wow, that’s amazing!” But you have doubts about how true that story is, if it could be an exaggeration or even made up. My brother almost last his hand to a severe burn when I was a girl, and I’ve always known to ice a burn then let it breathe. But to put an essential oil on it? Well, I confess I was dubious, as much as I believe in the healing potentials of essential oils.

The next morning, about 12 hours later, when I got up, I took the band-aids off. The blisters were gone! The skin was still white where they’d been, but there was no pain and no bubbling in the skin like what usually happens with a blister. A few hours after that, and even the white part of the skin where the blisters had been was gone too and you couldn’t even tell I’d been burned there less than 24 hours earlier. I know I generally get over things fairly quickly, but a burn blister is always at least 2-4 days. The blister swells, then bursts, then you get that hard skin, it’s yucky. But completely healed in less than a day with none of the post-effects? Color me lavender, and impressed. You can be sure I will always have some of that stuff on hand.

Has anything like that ever happened to you?