darwin award

Our darwin entry was the young man that was going to show his girlfriend just how much he loved her. He stood at the foot of the bed poured gasoline on his shirt and lit the shirt. He proved it so well he is waiting upstairs for her.

the saddest one was the night a young couple decided to get married. they had the house and the baby so why not. The bride was driving the car behind him and saw him run off the road and the truck flipped several times and burst into flames. He was wearing his seatbelt - too bad - this time the safety feature was his down fall he could not get the belt off and get out of the truck in time. Finally there were enough fire ext. there to permit someone to pull him out. Round here we refer to burn vic's as crispy critters. He was alive when he reached our ER. I was the dedicated burn nurse - I cannot smell burned flesh. The MD and I started working on him. The subclavian line sounded like it was going thru styrofoam. I was getting foley in Lets just saw it wasnot easy on either of us. We were pumping him with morphine and got fluids running..his family did not understand his condition and wanted him transfered to UAB Burn unit. Doc Sully called and UAB agreed to take him. Burn percent 97 percent body 3rd, 2 percent 2nd (groin area) and 1 percent that was 1st degree and it was right on the top of the head. His transport left our hosp. at 11:59pm Everyone asked me how long i said 12 hours. Got a call at home the next day he died at 11:57am. That was the worst case I saw alive his legs were contracted, his arms were contracted.

God bless ya, all of you.

An ex- con with psych issues, he took an iron and burned his eyes, ears and mouth. He lost both of his ears and had his eyelids sewn shut for months. He was actually one of the nicest patients on the unit!

Terribly sad ... the pretty yet depressed teenager who set herself a blaze over a boy in a failed suicide attempt. Now that she's alive and burnt over 60% of her body and trying to figure out how to deal with her scares for the rest of her life ... how depressed is she now???

Then, there's the Cup-o-Noodle burn epidemic!!! And guess what???? Our hospital serves Cup-o-Noodles as a snack to patients while they recover??? Unbelievable huh???

You gotta love the patients who were so inebriated and/or high when they got burned that they set unintentionally set themselves on fire, and then didn't know about it.

I'm not a nurse, but we once had a drug seeker who had been cut off by so many doctors, she took matters into her own hands. She doused herself in lighter fluid and struck a match.

She died not long afterwards of something else - I cannot remember what, but it was not related to the burn, nor was it suicide.