Chemical Burn

So instead of having our normal small group meeting tonight, we were enlisted to help lay a new wood floor in the smaller chapel at church.

From 7-11pm there were up to 12 of us working in the last third of the flooring. And of course there's a job for the meticulous/precise person that I am, so I was one of the ones pulling the boards, placing them in the right spot, and removing all excess glue with "something-salts". It smelled like paint remover or some other nasty substance that my dad has in the garage.

I was already prepared to get messy wearing shoes I didn't care about, a t-shirt from 1998, and jeans that had recently been placed in the "I can't patch you anymore, so what do I do with you now?" pile. And for my task, I had to keep a paper-towel doused in the nasty substance with me... so naturally, I put it in my pocket. I was a little worried about it eating a hole through my jeans, but I decided to risk it.

It wasn't until a couple hours later, when I noticed that the skin on my hip felt like it was burning, that I realized I should have been more concerned about my skin than my jeans. How in the world did I forget how sensitive my skin is?!?

I tried to suck it up, not really knowing how to solve the problem and figuring that my skin was just being irritable and that no real damage would be done if I continued working. But soon it got to the point where the pain was really distracting me... so I decided to at least attempt to wash it off (and it really just looked like a couple of my pores were irritated like a sparse rash).

And even though I did the best I could at cleaning my skin (and my jeans in that spot ) and keeping that substance out of my pockets, my skin was hurting even more (and tingling at times) by the time I left to come home.

Once at home, I found that there is now a patch of skin (in the shape of my pocket) that looks like it was sun-burned... and then it hit me: CHEMICAL BURN!

So I washed it off and I'll let it breath and hope that I can still wear jeans in the morning. Of course, I can't help imagining how disgusted Dr. Rose would be at my dangerously neglectful behavior while using potent chemicals... ha ha