Burns to the Hand

I was cooking dinner on Easter Sunday, and it was coming down to the wire.  I do a pretty good job these days of timing things such that my dishes are all ready at the same time.  Easter turned out to be one of those times I cut it a little too.  I was multi-tasking, and I got a little distracted.  In the midst of moving my rice from pot to bowl, my beans were ready to be served.  I took the now-cool lid off the pot and ladled them into a serving bowl.  I grabbed that and the bowl of rice, and I carried them out to the table.  Dinner was almost ready to do.

I had gotten distracted, of course, with everything going on and all the people buzzing about, moving things from the kitchen to the table.  In my distraction, I failed to realize that I had left on the burner where my rice had been cooking…and placed the lid from my beans right on it.  As everyone was beginning to make their way to the table, I rushed into the kitchen to grab something.  I noticed the lid on the stove, the beans uncovered, so, naturally, I sought to keep my wonderful beans warm.  I reached for the lid.

I am, of course, grateful that I was the one who grabbed the lid and not my wife or my sister-in-law, or one of my boys.  Unfortunately, the sound of sizzling flesh on heated metal keeps such gratitude at bay in the moment.  The pain was instantaneous.  I was moving to quickly grab the lid and put it on the pot to begin with, so I was fully committed to my grip.  The natural course of action would have been to drop the lid, but someone, I can’t recall whom, was standing next to the stove precisely where the trajectory of a flung lid would have been.  So, I held on to it and put it on the pot.  Loudly.

The only time I can remember any of my grandmother’s yelling at me was when I was about ten years old or so.  She was making coffee on the stove using one of those iron stove-top percolators.  I wanted to help, so I grabbed the percolator when she asked my mother to remove it from the flame.  At the age of ten, you tend to care less about not dropping things than you do the searing pain in your hands.  So, I flung the percolator and coffee spilled all over the place.  I think my grandmother yelled at me more out of fear than anything else.  When I recall her face today, I have to laugh.  I don’t know who was more scared.  Or who was more relieved at the relatively tame reddening of my fingers.  After all, the percolators was more insulated, and the heat hadn’t crept quite as greedily up the side of the device as it would have on…say…a stainless steel pot lid.

The pain in my hand was like television “snow” in my brain.  The white noise filled my head.  I know I was talking to my wife…something about burning and pain…but I can’t really recall what was said.  I just know that I felt the pain coming in waves of ever-intensifying pain.  It would come, ebb, then come back more viciously.  Each time, it grew worse and worse.  And worse.  “Do this!”  And, “Do that!”  Maybe there was a, “I read you shouldn’t do that.”  I can’t remember.  I just remember the sizzling sound, the burning pain, and the waves.  

I ran my hand under cold water to ease the pain.  It helped.  The moment I removed my hand, though, the pain came roaring back.  And the noise started to fill my ears.  Mercifully, my thumb took the brunt of it.  Don’t ask me why, but it did.  My ring finger also felt like it was on fire.  I stole a look at my thumb, and I could see four distinct blisters already forming just minutes after the incident.  I remember thinking to myself, “This is going to be bad,” as cold sweat ran down the back of my neck.

That’s when I saw my wife’s hands around mine, gently cradling my pain.  I felt the warmth of her hands hovering a fraction of an inch above my skin.  From her skin, I felt a warm, steady…flow.  I don’t know what else to call it.  I felt her flowing into me.  I closed my eyes, and I attempted to feel her from inside my hand.  Crazy.  All I felt was the waves of pain.  Then, she called my boys over.  Together, the three of them laid their hands on mine, closed their eyes, and…made it all better.

The pain didn’t leave immediately, but I felt the waves begin to lessen in intensity.  I took a deep breath.  They smiled at me, sent loving energy my way, asked if it felt better.  I told them it did.  It didn’t at first, to be honest, but it got better with each minute.  We sat down to eat.  Later, as the meal drew to a close, I looked down at my finger.  The blisters that had been spreading in front of my eyes about an hour before had shrunk.  They were there, but they not longer threatened to merge into one.  The pain was a shadow of what it had been.

 I wouldn’t have believe it myself had I not experienced it first hand.  It is called Quantum Healing, and it operates on a level I do not understand.  I know it when I feel it, but I can’t tell you much more about it.  There’s a book somewhere here in my house that I feel compelled to read now.  Maybe I won’t.  Maybe this was just one of those moments of faith, where I believed in my family, and they believed in themselves.  Maybe I just over-estimated my injury.  Who knows.  All I know is that there isn’t so much as a scar on my hand.  The skin on my thumb is a little rough, but that’s it.  It has begun to peel away a little, like dry skin.  It’s no more than dry skin.  Not so much as a blister or an area of reddened flesh.  All evidence is gone.  Nothing ever happened.

It’s as if I’d never suffered burns to the hand.