An incident between Imogen and a hot cup of coffee..

Have just got back from a week on North Stradbroke Island ("Straddie") with Peter and Harriet and various members of Rachel's clan. I will post separately with holiday pics and about Pete's visit.. but the big drama of the week is that Imogen managed to give herself partial-thickness burns over all of her right hand (2nd degree burns in old money).

She stuck her hand in a newly made cup of coffee and screamed but didnt think to take her hand out for a second or two. We immediately put it in cold water but as I saw the skin off her thumb start to fall off I thought that we had better find someone with letters after their name more qualified than us to treat it. We drove to the doctor on the island who smothered it in burn cream and wrapped it up and sent us back to the mainland to the specialist burns centre at the Royal Children's Hospital in Brisbane. On arrival there they took the bandage off and her hand had swollen up and had massive blisters on the fingers and palm which they had to "de-roof" or burst in plain english. they then cut away the skin that was already dead and bandaged her up with silver coated dressings - keepimng the fingers splayed so they did not join together.... Imogen found this all very traumatic as you can imagine and not sure her mum and dad found it much easier as we had to physically hold her down as she was screaming and thrashing about whilst they cut away at the skin and then bandaged her. This was all on Saturday and we had to then repeat the procedure yesterday and will have to do so every 3 days for then 2-3 weeks.. she is actually in good spirits when the bandages are on as you can see from the pics below..

So all in all a bit of drama but she will be ok. I promise I will post again tomorrow or thursday with happy photos from Pete and Harriet's trip down under - it was really good to see them and I hope they enjoyed it...