General Q and A Forum - Scalding Hot

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Q: Scalding Hot

asked by: boobertube on October 28th, 2005

New User

I'm not sure what is right to do. I was waxing my legs and the wax began to cool. So I reheated it and when I took it out of the microwave the wax spilled out and onto my bare leg. I couldn't wipe it off in time, it was already stiffening, so I peeled it off. It took some skin off with it. I looked online about burn treatments. It appears to be just a first degree burn except that skin has peeled off. Skin peeling is like a second degree burn, but I think that it only peeled because it was wax and not just liquid that I spilled on me. It's red and it stings. There are no blisters right now. Online some sites said run it under cool water and add ointment. Others say cool water and no ointment. One site said no water on it at all. Well, I had to do something. I ran it under cool water for a bit, put aloe vera gel on to calm it down. After that was soaked in completely I put on neosporin and let the area breathe until I had to get dressed, and so then I put a nonstick bandage over it. Did I do right or should I do something else?

Replies(1)

seek_help

replied on November 20th, 2005

New User

Re: Scalding Hot

boobertube wrote:

i'm not sure what is right to do. I was waxing my legs and the wax began to cool. So I reheated it and when I took it out of the microwave the wax spilled out and onto my bare leg. I couldn't wipe it off in time, it was already stiffening, so I peeled it off. It took some skin off with it. I looked online about burn treatments. It appears to be just a first degree burn except that skin has peeled off. Skin peeling is like a second degree burn, but I think that it only peeled because it was wax and not just liquid that I spilled on me. It's red and it stings. There are no blisters right now. Online some sites said run it under cool water and add ointment. Others say cool water and no ointment. One site said no water on it at all. Well, I had to do something. I ran it under cool water for a bit, put aloe vera gel on to calm it down. After that was soaked in completely I put on neosporin and let the area breathe until I had to get dressed, and so then I put a nonstick bandage over it. did I do right or should I do something else?

you should have immediately gone to your local hospital or doctor to get proper medical treatment. Checking a couple of internet sites which provide conflicting information is no substitute for the advice of a trained medical professional. What if your skin doesn't grow back because you followed the wrong advice? What if you could have done something really simple (but not obvious) which would have resulted in minimal to no scarring... But now it's too late to prevent scars?

On the flipside, the human body is very robust and you'll heal up pretty good without any problems. Since it's been a couple of weeks, i'm sure you're well on your way to having a great patch of skin which will be all scabby for a while but which, over time, will come out just fine. Legs are meant to take a lot of abuse and in time nobody will be able to know that anything happened.

I'm not a medical professional myself, so take this for what it's worth: keep a box of spenco second skin around for just such cases. It's a thin layer of gel-like material which is made from something like 95% water:

http://www.Dressings.Org/dressings/spenco. 2sk.Html
http://www.Spenco.Com/prod_2ndskin_moistbu rnpads.Html

i don't have any affiliation with them. I heard about it from someone who is a medical professional and who said that after seeing one patient put this on immediately after being burned, that it essentially prevented a lot of complications. I'm guessing that, in your case, the aloe vera gel likely served a similar function so you probably did allright. However, I urge you to still follow it up with professional medical advice if you haven't already.

(edited to add dressings.Org link. Also, what's up with this site changing around my capitalization? All words get decapitalized unless preceded by a period. Rather stupid if you need to include proper names.)

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