Shock and Paw

Note: this post was originally written November 9, 2007

When China isn’t serving you tea, mincing past you in knee-high boots, or showering you in exhaust and chili oil, it’s trying to kill you. At least, it tried to kill Paul a couple of weeks ago.

Safety standards are, well, pretty standard, even if they aren’t what I’d call safe. This is a country where parents have their three-year-olds ride standing up on the handlebars of motorcycles. Babies have split pants so they can shit in the street. Green means go, whether you’re turning left or going straight – in either direction. What’s a seatbelt? The way we know when a particular outlet is working on any given day is if it arcs blue light when we plug something into it. Did I mention the decorative belladonna bush that overhangs our walkway?

So, I came home from the gym one night to find Paul sitting at his computer, holding his arm out at a funny angle, like a waiter balancing a large tray on his palm. He didn’t look at me as I came in, but continued to navigate his google search – using his left hand. I looked at the search window: “emergency burn care.” His first words were, “I think I fucked it up.” I looked away from the screen and saw what he was presenting me – a blackened mess where a hand should have been.

“WHAT HAPPENED” I could hear my voice sounding supernaturally low and steady, pitched for stability in crisis mode, already dragging him into the kitchen, running water from the tap into a plastic tub and pulling all the icecube trays from the freezer. “Dunk your hand while you talk.” Between winces and gritted teeth he explained that the evening had turned unseasonably cool, and he had decided to turn on the heat. Our heater is a small, radiator-looking contraption on wheels. We have them in the States, as well – they guzzle electricity to warm oil in the radiators’ gills, and produce only enough warmth to throw off the chill. I had one in my apartment on 35th Avenue, and had to practically sit on it to stay warm in the winter. So, the plug on this particular heater has never seemed entirely sound, but we were assured that it worked just fine, along with all the other arcing, sparking appliances in the apartment. Paul had gone to plug it into one of the few grounded sockets that allow for larger items (like the heater), and had received in return an explosive jolt of electricity that burst the cord into two charred, frizzled chunks and left a leathery black glove for his palm.

At this point, let me pause to clarify. Yes, his hand was badly burned. Did he have his left hand on something metal? Was he standing in water when it happened? Did the cord stay in his hand, connected to the socket? No, no, and no. Therefore, I have a husband with a damaged hand; I am not a widow making arrangements to return to the States. After checking his pupils and heartbeat and vestibular signs, we decided that the electric shock to his system had done no worse than burn his skin, a fact for which I can find no words for or limits to my relief. He was, in effect, quite lucky. The hair on the back of my neck stands on end.

The next several hours were, for him, all about pain. He sat in a chair in the living room and allowed me to fuss over him, refilling the tub with ice water as it melted and warmed, feeding him tylenol and glasses of wine, making dinner and distracting him with a great weird little movie wherein Ben Kingsley plays a hitman in AA. After a couple of hours of soaking, we decided it was time to get the black off. Thankfully, the char was more from the cord than his actual skin, so it was a matter of scrubbing the sticky mess from a surface that was already forming into a complicated mass of wrinkled blisters. The scrubbing proved too painful, and we didn’t want to break the skin and risk infection, so we let it be, having cleaned it with soap and water and slathered it with burn cream. A lonely potted aloe vera grows in spite of its neglect out in the courtyard near our gate, and we split open a pilfered leaf and pressed it goo side down on top of the other cream, then wrapped the entire paw in a mass of bandages. Unbelievably, Paul drifted off for a few hours near morning, and the next day saw us at the hospital, for the first of several visits.

The doctors were, overall, both nice and competent enough – one a rotund Bolivian woman who speaks sweetly incoherent English and who hisses at the Chinese nurses when her mood turns sour. The other is a neatly groomed, polite Chinese man with delicate features to match his manner, one who listened carefully and showed real concern for Paul’s discomfort, even if he didn’t always seem to have faith in his own abilities. Deferring to the woman, he agreed to cut the blisters from Paul’s hand on the second visit, a move that left him open to infection, but which sped up the healing process overall. They didn’t trust us to change the dressings ourselves, and wanted Paul to return several times a day for weeks. We refused, and managed to come back only for frequent status checkups – it’s slow at the clinic, and they genuinely seemed to want to stay apprised of his progress.

It’s been two and a half weeks now, and Paul used chopsticks for the first time a few days ago. He has gingerly begun writing, as well. Apparently the damage has yet to return his ability to do dishes, an unexpected side effect, yet one that he assures me hurts him more than it does me. Hmmm.

This is what his hand looked like after three days of healing and two trips to the doctor. It looks great, comparatively. Note the leathery surface of the palm surrounding the blisters…very nice.

~ by knifemaker on November 20, 2007.