Common Injuries

It's very normal for cooks to get injured at work.  Minor injuries include cuts, burns and bruises.  Every once in a while a cook will be sent to the emergency room for cutting the tip of their finger off, I saw it happen twice already, and it's not pretty.  Well, today, I burned my hand and wrist during dinner service while cooking two orders of striped bass, salmon, pompano and a lobster if I remember correctly.  This is a pretty normal fire, but I was careless and the hot oil inside the cast iron pan spilled directly on my arm.  I was pulling the pan back to throw into the oven, but the angle of the pan and the speed of which it was pulled back made the oil spill right out towards the handle and onto my skin.  This all happened around 7:30 pm, when we were starting to get slammed.  So, I quickly ran my arm under cold water for about a minute or two and went straight back to work.  When you get a pretty severe burn, anytime that wound gets near heat it burns like crazy.  Almost like getting burned AGAIN.  I toughed it out and around 9:30 pm when things finally slowed down, I went to Roosevelt Hospital's ER, following the advice from Sous Chefs.  I waited around 2 hours and saw a doctor.   He rubbed Bacitracin Ointment on the wound and wrapped it with roll gauze, which can't be removed for 3 days since I had first and second degree burns.  The doctor prescribed ibuprofen and oxycodone, which I'm probably not going to take.  I also got a tetanus shot and he instructed me to take 3 days off from work.  I'm going in tomorrow, I'm gonna help the chef at the pass to plate food, that's the least I could do.

Some before and after pictures (it might be a lil nasty, sorry!)

 

Scars and wounds stay in our minds.  I will never forget what I ate this morning, what I wore, what the weather was like, who I spoke to, why I burned myself and the people I worked with.  This is the beauty of scars.  It's history and memory and I might sound like I love getting hurt but I really don't.  But I do appreciate battle scars cause the crew won the battle with a few nicks and brusies. Damn, I should have been a poet.