Month 11: Lightbulbs and Little Fingers

Yes, you read that right. Lightbulbs. Or to be more exact, just one lightbulb - that's all it takes to burn the poop out of four tiny perfect little fingers.

It's actually my fault, which is the worst part of the whole ordeal. I was doing a photo shoot, so our torch lamp was on for extra lighting. Daniel crawled over to where I was kneeling, and I had the lamp on the floor. I started taking pictures of him as he crawled in my lap, and I would have seen him reaching for the bulb if there hadn't been a camera in my face. Sadly, I caught the exact moment when he touched the bulb and his sweet little face contorted in pain.

A piece of me broke in that moment and is never going to heal. I caused him pain. Because of something I did (or didn't do), his body suffered. This must be another one of those inevitable parental rites of passage - I imagine I should brace myself for more to come. But this first one was devastating.

We rushed him to cold water (the wrong thing to do, we later found out) and those tiny red blisters started to swell. Daniel cried new tears - a kind of pain I had never seen on his face. It only stopped when we put cold mayo on his fingers - a trick I had heard somewhere, and while it probably didn't help the healing, it distracted him enough to stop crying. Fernando took him into the doctor immediately, and we're currently watching for signs of fever, arm rash, or puss under the blisters (all five of which have grown to the size of small grapes).

Daniel's little hand stays bandaged with neosporin, gauze and tape. It's precious to watch him cope with a "mitten hand" and he's doing very well - eating, crawling, waving, and playing. It seems like the pain is gone, and it's just a matter of waiting for the blisters to heal.

From what I have read, there will be scarring, so I have a few years to invent a new, cooler story as to how this happened for Daniel to tell his friends when they see the scars. (And just between you and me, I'm thinking that perhaps in the new story, it won't be Mommy's fault...)