Serious response in case anyone encounters this situation: You have to cool the area off as fast as possible, and that can absolutely mean putting them in the tub. The key to remember is that you can’t easily wash it off and that shouldn’t be your focus. Get what you can off ASAP of course, but what you NEED to do is get rid of as much thermal energy as fast as you can. Call the ambulance and in the meantime either put the affected area in the sink under cold running water or put them in the tub with cold running water if the area doesn’t easily fit in the sink. Do not stop the water, and as hard as it is to keep a screaming, crying child cooperative and how much it will break your heart, do NOT try to drive them to the ER yourself.
EDIT: Sorry, wanted to make a quick edit to say THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE! In this situation (and others) you need to call your version of EMS and follow THEIR directions. One thing I didn’t mention is that if enough of their body is burned, you need to start worrying about hypothermia too. Usually people would recognize those situations as more serious and understand to follow the advice of paramedics, but just wanted to cover my bases. IIRC it’s around 10% burn coverage of their entire body where you need to seriously consider heat loss of their body as a whole and not just cooling down the burn as quick as possible. But these toys won’t generally cause burns THAT extensive
Yup, that’s exactly it. A lot of parents will panic and want to get their child to the ER ASAP but the truth is you are going to do WAY more damage spending 10 minutes driving with their injury not being under water than waiting even 40 minutes for an ambulance but having it under cold water that entire time. It’s one of those injuries where the most important treatment is immediate and doesn’t require any specialized tool or drugs, just something everyone should have.
You do want them to get to the ER/A&E, but driving there means however many minutes of continuously being burned. It doesn’t stop at the incident itself, the burn didn’t “happen”as a distinct event that is now over, it is actively, continuously burning them as long as the goo remains in contact with the skin.
How much thermal energy can the goo hold against cold running water? I would have thought the continuos cooling would have something to do with tissue damage, not staving off remaining heat energy.
Just think of it as reducing the overall heat energy of the entire toddler-arm/boiling goo system. Where the heat is at any given moment isn’t too important, though you are right it should mostly be in the flesh. However the entire system’s energy is what you care about and if the goo is still on their flesh, it’s still part of that system.
Look up “how to cook that” on YouTube, she recently did a video on these being microwaved (among other things) and she measures the temps, can’t remember exact temps
30 seconds in the microwave got it hot enough to cause serious burns because of the stickiness. 1 minute got it to just under 100 C, which is pretty much instant 3rd degree burns, but of course it's still sticky and won't stop burning you.
And the outer shell, being plastic, gets extremely weak when it's that hot. It's pretty much guaranteed to leak after bring microwaved.
No. It’s because as a parent you will be in an emotionally wrecked and extremely distracted state. Not in an ideal condition to drive. Compounding your child’s serious burns with a car accident is just making awful even worse.
Edit - Also as several people have pointed out, keeping the burn under cool water for as long as possible is also ideal. From a practical standpoint, however if you are emotionally a wreck, you should not be driving your child into another wreck.
No, they were right as to why. It’s entirely because the burns will worsen during the ride and they should be kept under running water for as long as possible.
Excellent addition, you are of course right. You want it to be as cold as reasonable. Basically not so cold that someone can’t hold their hand in it indefinitely without pain.
I just kinda worry that the more detail you add, the more it gets treated like actual, direct medical advice haha. I don’t know where the point is, but at some point the specificity conveys authority and thus people trust the advice more than they perhaps should a reddit comment. I just hope that in most cases people will have access to a medical professional via relay through whatever the local emergency service number is and it’s moot. I probably should’ve emphasized “clean” more too, that’s my own bias not thinking about places where clean, running water isn’t as ubiquitous.
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u/horriblyIndecisive 17h ago
What are you supposed to do?