Perhaps My Weirdest Injury Yet

I have never been easy on myself. I do not mean that in the sense of "we are our own worst critic", though that is true as well. No, I say this moreso because I am remiss to engage in most physically threatening activities, yet the ones in which I do partake I tend to carry to extremes and find the most odd way of injuring my self.

I have never been "seriously" injured, no broken bones or sprains or stitch-requiring wounds, because I never engage in activities that would atypically lead to such. My experience with illnesses is limited to the more common types such as strep throat, bronchitis or the flu; I feel it necessary to point out that I did not list chicken pox, to which I have a several-generations deep immunity. I've even had my fair share of bites from this region's webby friend Tegenaria agrestis with mild lasting results. All in all I cannot say that my body has ever sustained any grave illness or injury, so in my mind it is highly amusing that despite my cautious and worry-free existence, I have still managed to procure the amount of scarring that I have.

Granted a large portion of my scars are minor and even then you must know where to look, with the bulk due namely to that special sort of love and bonding only cats can impart to their human companions. The scars gathered in more recent years are mainly from crafting and cooking, cuts from either thin X-acto knife blades or thick butcher's knives, burns from the coils in an oven or the edge of a pan. But yesterday I discovered a new way to injure myself in a wholly unexpected way: I was burned by my heating pad.

It is true, the heat pad has warnings to prevent such an event. Warnings that I was intentionally ignoring when I was burned, such as "do not crush pad", which I assume means that I should not have been laying on it. "Never place pad between yourself and a bed"--yep, bed. And then there's "Do not use while sleeping," a rule which I am quite good at not adhering to. Yet I usually figure that I should be pretty safe, as the pad will only remain heated for 30 minutes after setting the temperature, and cools down quickly thereafter.

You see, it all started with the full moon yesterday. My body has gone to the trouble of syncing itself with the cycles of the moon, in that most feminine of ways. So when the full moon was at its station, there I was, curled up in bed in minor agony with my trusty heat pad right where I needed it. I remember thinking at one point, wow, this seems really hot. I believe I turned it down a few levels, but more or less kept sleeping. In the morning I quickly noticed the odd marks on my arm--yes, my arm, though I'm not quite sure how my arm was the victim when the pad was at my lower abdomen--that at first I thought were perhaps just imprints from the way I was lying. Yet no, it was soon obvious that my heat pad had burned an area on the outside of my right arm.


Today the burn is not quite so bad; the two odd little dots have gone and the main burn has receded to the white area in the center, which is now quite thoroughly blistered. Strange thing is, this is perhaps the first burn I have ever sustained that does not hurt. It gets a little irritated at times, but I would expect it to hurt at least when I immerse it in a tub of masochistically hot water. And frankly, this lack of sensation kind of worries me. How is this different from any other burn I've sustained via heat? I find myself being amused at the concept of having cooked my arm meats 'til they were well-done and senseless--well, not senseless, as the burn still feels (just not pain from heat, though I'm sure it would hurt if I cut it with a knife).

And that, dear friends, is the tale of a cautious little girl who could. Honest, I was not trying to hurt myself--if I had intent to inflict a burn I'd use an open flame and metal rod--but I am impressed at my body's willingness to find itself in the path of odd injuries, even while unconscious. This is not the most painful injury I've ever sustained, but it is bar far the oddest.