THE LUCKIEST DAY OF MY LIFE

Skitch and her After-Bath-Snuggle-Buddy, Liam

THEN:   

The Luckiest Day of my Life or I Bless the day of the Cooked Foot


    On what was probably the luckiest or most blessed day of my entire life, I did not win the lottery or a trip to Hawaii. I didn't win anything that might make you think of me as lucky. In fact I was wounded pretty badly, but it remains in my heart the most blessed of all my days!

    It was the early 90s and I had one son that could not yet walk and one that I had to keep scraping off the walls because he walked everywhere, and climbed everywhere. I was still living with their dad at that time and things were tough in several ways, most noticeably they were financially tough. Both the adults in the home were unemployed, young, and therefore inexperienced. When my husband found a part time job or an odd job that he could do to earn a little money he often spent a significant portion of his earnings on alcohol. Like I said, I was young and inexperienced. A mountain woman my age would never put up with that!

    We were looking forward to our income tax return, planning to catch up on some bills and purchase some things we were in need of, including parts for a broken water heater. For several months I had been heating bath water on the stove and carrying it down the long hall of the mobile home we lived in. On this lucky day the check had finally arrived, but the check had nothing to do with the luck. In those days there were no instant refunds, so for a while I had nearly been bursting with the anticipation of getting the monkey off our back and the wolf away from the door. 

    When we found out the check had come, I called my parents and asked them if they could keep my two young sons, Cory and Liam, while my husband I went to pay bills and purchase the items on my list. My parents agreed; they were always happy to help with the boys. I had started heating water for my bath. The boys had been bathed before bed the night before, as was our custom, and I had already filled the tub up once for my husband to bathe a few hours earlier. 

    Cory was playing in the kitchen floor with Matchbox and Hotwheels cars. Liam was in his baby walker, pushing his way around, running over his brother's vehicles and frustrating Cory. Instinctively, I did what my mother had taught me to do when my nieces and nephew were little. I moved the kids from the kitchen because hot stuff was going to be transferred. I helped Cory gather his cars and, despite his pointing out that they do not roll very well on carpet, I moved his play to the living room, giving him a couple of large books to "drive" on. I pushed Liam into the living room as well, and dropped a broom down in his path so that he could not scoot his way back into the kitchen. 

    I then picked up my old kettle full of boiling water and turned around to take it through the hall. (If you took super hot water in there then you could add the cold from the spigot and it kept you from having to carry so much water from the stove.) As soon as I took the first step, the handle broke and boiling water landed on both my feet. My left one caught most of it. I had on the big slouch socks that were popular in those days, folded over at the top. When the water landed on my feet I was washed with a quick stab of agony and panic. I must tell you that, just a little, I urinated. For a second or two time stood still and I was caught in that land of fear and pain that I've visited more than I ever wanted to. I was smothered in the idea of "What now?" Then time picked up and moved normally again. I met my spouses eyes and they clearly said, "Uh oh! You are in big trouble!" My brain kicked in and demanded that I pull the socks off, but when it also whispered, "Your flesh may come with it." I grasped for the next best thing. I didn't think I could handle tearing off my own skin. My brain said "Cold water then!" I headed down the hall to the bathtub. My right foot was screaming in agony but the left one felt like it belonged to someone else. It felt like a stump that I could not control. I yanked it along and tried to not trip over it. 

    Once I made it to the tub, I put both feet, socks and all, in cold running water. I peeked under the sock on my right foot, pink skin that did not stick to the cloth. I removed that sock. I looked under the other one. The skin there was a scalded, angry red, but it too did not stick to the sock. I pulled off that sock as well. 

    My husband called my parents and told them what had happened. He said he wasn't sure, but maybe I needed to go to a hospital. My folks jumped in their vehicle and were there before I'd even moved out of the tub, because every time I pulled the right foot out of the trickle of cold water I had it under it started burning and I had to put it back. 

    While I was waiting - for my right foot to stop burning, for my left foot to start burning, for my parents to arrive, for evidence enough to make the decision about going to the hospital, for so much, and for nothing - I had time to think about what did happen and what might have happened.

    When my mother arrived, I told her, "Momma, thank you! Thank you so much for teaching me to keep kids out of the kitchen when you are messing with hot stuff! This could have happened to one or both of the boy's and it would have covered their whole little body!" When my sister's kids had visited, my mother had always insisted that they stay "out from under foot" when people were cooking. She had not allowed me to touch the stove until I was nearly an adult and then only for popcorn, or cornbread, or something terribly easy. I was an accident waiting to happen and she knew it. So, largely by example, she taught me that when you have kids in the house you never leave the kitchen with something cooking, you never cook on the front burners, and you keep all cords and stove knobs out of reach of little fingers. I had followed all those rules with my own children and, on this particular day, mother's rules had possibly saved their skin, maybe even their lives. 

    My right foot soon stopped burning enough for me to crawl out of the tub. I told my mom, "The right foot hurts but I know I got most of the water on the left foot." 

    She said, "Well, let's worry about the one that hurts. " That time she was wrong, and some nagging in the back of my head said, "Something is not right here. You know you injured that left foot more. Why isn't it hurting?"
    Soon, the pain eased off enough for me to put on a pair of sneakers, leave the boys with my parents, and go pay bills and run errands. While we were doing that a large water blister grew on top of my left foot. That night I slept with it out from under the covers, which I never do. Even in the heat of summer, I liked to at least have a sheet over my feet. The next morning I awoke to find that, despite my efforts to protect it, the blister had burst and the entire top of my foot was covered in raw meat. It was a nasty looking wound. I went to a doctor straight away and he told me. "If a pot handle is going to break when you're carrying boiling water you are best off to have shoes on. If you don't have shoes on, you should hope to have no socks. If you have socks on you should hope to think to pull those socks off as quickly as humanly possible after the water hits them. You wore your socks through the house to the tub and that entire time the heat they held onto was cooking your feet. You have first and second degree burns on the right foot. It will hurt for a while but will do okay without a doctors care. You have third degree burns on the left foot and it did not hurt because you killed the nerves in it. You need to come back to see me every day for thirty days and let me work on that foot. If you come back every day, and you do exactly as I tell you, you can probably keep it. Probably! It could still set in an infection that would force us to amputate the foot or even cause you to lose your life. You will certainly be scarred; you may need skin grafts. We will just have to wait and see."

    For thirty days, I made the trip to town with my foot bandaged up and a pair of awkward crutches under my arms. For thirty days, I settled onto a table and the doctor scrubbed my raw flesh with gauze while the nurse poured sterile water over it. The water came out of the jug clear and landed in the basin below a sickly pink. I would hold my breath and grit my teeth, as my daddy taught me to deal with pain, and I got through every session without weeping or calling out for mercy. I did sometimes ask (gasp) for a moment to catch my breath. Then back at it the three of us would go. I tried to keep enough sanity to pray. When my strength allowed, I used that time to thank the God I knew and loved for keeping this agony from my little boys. When my strength did not allow, my mind was reduced to a white hot light of pain, a scream inside my head. The cleaning only took a few minutes, but it seemed longer. My husband and I would then hurry home because (after the first day) experience taught me that the worst was yet to come. About fifteen minutes after the cleaning my foot would begin to tingle, then sting, then burn. By the time we made the twenty minute trip home it would feel as if it were being held in the deepest pits of hell. It helped to prop it up higher than my head. The lower it was the hotter it felt. I did sometimes weep during those moments because they went on much too long for the breath-holding-teeth-gritting method to help me. 

    One day I took my sister Lila and my niece Shanna along on the trip to see the doctor. Shanna was about twelve, a timid girl that hated injections and seemed to have a low threshold for pain. She spent a lot of time being ill and under a doctor's care. I thought that watching me deal with pain might help her understand that she was not alone the next time she had to deal with something painful. I hoped it might fortify her. I expressed this idea to my sister and she agreed. They went into the examination room with me, and the doctor asked me how long it had been since my last tetanus shot. I could not remember. He went out to tend to some other issue and sent a nurse in with a needle less than an inch long to give me a tetanus injection, "Just in case." The needle barely hurt at all. Then the doctor came back into the room with a different nurse and Lila and Shanna watched as he scrubbed my wound. When he was finished I sat up, took a deep breath, and looked at them. My sister's eyes were filled with respect and something akin to sympathy. My niece looked a bit horrified, and I wondered, "Was this too much for her?"

    As I was hobbling back to the car, I didn't speak. I waited to see what my sister and my niece would say about the experience. Before I'd hobbled more than a dozen steps through the parking lot Shanna cried out, "I can't believe you took that shot and didn't even cry!" Lila and I laughed until we were nearly hysterical. 

    During that hard month my husband took over the cooking and washed dishes a few times, but he would not touch the other housekeeping chores. This was not a big deal to me at that time because I'd fallen into a deep state of depression and hardly bothered with them myself. It was evident that a clean house was important to my spouse but a sober husband was important to me. I think I figured, "If he doesn't care about what I want and need why should I care about what he wants and needs." Plus, I was exhausted from keeping up with my two sons, so housework had hit the rock bottom of my to-do list. I kept the area the boys played in clean, I washed our sheets and clothing. I washed enough dishes to eat off of and cook out of. Every now and then I wiped down the tub, and toilet, and both the bathroom and kitchen sinks. That was about it, so an untidy house was no big deal to me. But he also would not get up in the night with the baby. He would not even get up in the night with me and help with the baby. This was a big deal. Liam was no longer breast feeding, and cranky nights meant trips to the kitchen in the wee hours of the morning for a bottle. I clearly remember crawling through my house on two limbs, cuddling Liam against me like a mother monkey. I used one arm to crawl, one arm to hold the baby under me and pushed up against my chest. I used one leg to crawl, and held the other injured leg out behind me. I did not leave Liam in his crib and crying because his crib was in my room, and I feared that if I left him there, making all that noise, my husband would eventually sit up and, at the very least, smack the baby's little legs. That would have mean war and I was in no shape for war. Once I'd crawled to the kitchen and made the bottle, I would sit with my back against the kitchen wall and gave him half of it, enough to calm him for the trip back to the bedroom. Then when we were back in the bedroom, I gave him the rest of the bottle and put him back in his crib without all the jostling of being carried like a monkey. I remember sitting in the kitchen, feeding the baby, and trying to keep my tears of disappointment and frustration off of his tiny face.

    Once during that time I dared the trip up the thirty-two steps to my parent's house. My husband carried the baby up, and I scooted up the steps on my butt. I asked my mother to help me bathe Liam because for some odd reason, my foot would burn a lot more if I put it low to the ground, which was where it surely was when I stood up for certain tasks or chores, like that one.

    She gave him a nice warm bath in the kitchen sink and marveled at how still he would hold while she poured water over his hair. Both my boys had quickly learned that if they held very still while I washed and rinsed their hair they would not get the water and soap in their eyes. If they fought and wiggled they forced me to just pour it haphazardly over their heads and they did not prefer that.

    When mother finished bathing him she let out the water and wrapped him in a towel. I was sitting nearby with my foot propped up and said, "Quickly! Hand him to me!" She was puzzled but brought him to me as quickly as she could. Liam then began to snuggle into my neck while I dried him off. He would wiggle and snuggle and snuggle and wiggle. My mother and I laughed at the silly little baby then. Now the after-bath-snuggle-bunny is one of my fondest memories of Liam's babyhood.

    I did get to keep my life and my foot, and I didn't even have to have one skin graft. The doctor was happy to tell me that the intense pain I kept feeling day after day meant that my nerves were repairing as we went along. So, I took that knowledge and fed my strength with it. The pain was a good thing. 

    It did not take me years to see the silver lining for that cloud. I am left only with a large scar that has lessened some over the years. I knew, from day one, that I could have lost one of my sons, or seen them in much worse agony than I was in, scarred and maimed for life. I told the doctor what a blessing that day was, compared to what it could have been and explained what I meant. He starred at me a long time before saying, "You have one incredible attitude." 

    I said, "No doctor. I have two incredible sons!" And he smiled.

    So there you have it: Perhaps I had other days that were as blessed, possibly even more. Maybe the time Cory fell and had a bump the size of a duck egg on his forehead, was an even luckier day. Maybe the day Liam got out of the hospital after having bronchitis was a miracle to surpass the day I dropped boiling water. I've certainly had a lot of blessed days! But as far as I, with my week and mortal mind tell, the luckiest and most blessed day of my life I did not win the lottery or a trip to Hawaii. I won something so much better: two unmaimed and living little sons that would grow up to be two grown men any mother would be more than proud of. And so, now and forever, I bless the day of the cooked foot!