E R N I E ' S   H O U S E   O F   W H O O P A S S

I can always indulge my supremely infantile potty humor by reading Tasteless Tuesday stories. Granted, a few leave me squeamish, and I think there were a couple I couldn't finish, but after I saw dragonfly submit her story I knew I had one to match it.

On my 17th birthday my parents granted me permission to go up to the lake camping with my best friend, my boyfriend, and our group of friends. We were going to be staying in one cabin while some set of parents was in the other. They knew we'd be drinking and smoking weed, and pretty much left us to our own devices.

We get up there, it's beautiful, and start knockin' 'em back. Bear in mind that at this point I am about 8 hours away from turning 17, and consequently, although not for lack of trying, I have yet to become the skilled drinker I can now call myself. So we're drinking disgusting peach coolers, or something like that that high school girls always seem to enjoy (good thing THAT ended!) and keep getting progressively drunker.

At one point everyone decides to start throwing stuff into the campfire, like the Wendy's bag from the truck, and empty cigarette packets, and empty beer cans. Apparently this has been done before at said campsite, since the pit is full of other burnt debris. I lurch up from my seat and declare that the sea is calling me. Teetering and tottering I wobble over to the lake, jump out of my shorts and dive in, wearing a bikini that would only have looked good on a 17 year old girl.

I come to with a blinding flash of reality and the water's fucking cold. I scurry over to the debris-filled campfire. But those darn peach coolers have shot my balance to shit - and I begin to tip. I tip into the fire wearing nothing but a bikini. Amazingly, I have the presence of mind to stick my right arm out to stop myself. My entire right arm, is now immersed in the flames of a Junior Bacon Cheeseburger and some Labatt cans, along with whatever other garbage made it there before. It is heart stopping pain; in fact, at first, I can't feel anything.

The guys haul me out of the fire and throw me into the lake. I dip my burnt arm into the lakewater and put my fingers on it. As I take my left hand away, I can see, through the bright moonlight, shreds of skin hanging off it. I look down at my arm, now a bright throbbing patch of skinless tissue with the outline of my fingers and the removed skin, and I begin to scream "My skin is coming off!" At this point I go into shock for the first time. (I learned later that my friends dumped me into bed and took off to keep partying, which would explain how I got clumps of dog hair and couch fibres embedded in the pus that grew up overnight.)

The rest of the night is a blur, until the next morning when my fuckhead friends realize I need medical assistance, and badly. They drop me off at a fucking small town medical clinic and take off for the lake (the bastards.) The nurse asks me why I'm there, and I lift up my beach towel to reveal my arm, burnt from wrist to shoulder about halfway around. The edges of the burn are singed black, like a well done hotdog, and the skinless region has started oozing pus mixed with blood in areas that are more deeply burnt. The aroma of cooked flesh fills the waiting room and the nurse's eyes just about pop out of her head. In the bright fluorescent lights, I can see the burn becoming purple in areas below the layer of sticky, yellowing pus. My pupils are the size of dimes and I am passing in and out of shock. I turn and vomit into the garbage can from the pain and the booze I consumed the night before. Fortunately they see this as enough to put me in ahead of the people with appoin! tments.

They pump me full of morphine and send me into the city, where I have the second degree burn scrubbed with a nail brush until I pass out and go back into shock (the technical term for this is "debriding." If a doctor uses this word around you, run like hell.) When the burn starts bleeding the resident asks me to do it to myself -- highly fucking unlikely. Through the haze of the painkillers (which were inadequate, as I recall) and the shock, I recall the doctor being forced to use several separate brushes because there was so much burnt skin and tissue clogging the used ones that they weren't taking off enough dead stuff. They spent about 6 hours debriding the burn.

Later on I found out that I had something like 15% of my body covered in second degree burns. A second degree burn means you have piles of tissue damage but the nerves still work, so you feel everything they do to you.

Over the course of the next three months, I visit the hospital every day, where they peel off any skin that is overly coated with pus in hot water and examine the edges of the burn for infection. I start the 12th grade with my arm coated in gauze and smelling absolutely vomit inducing. Kids don't want to sit next to me in class, but teachers bump up my grades out of pity.

As for the dickwad friends who dumped me at a clinic at 17 in an unfamiliar town with second degree burns? Last I heard, they were too dim to pass vocational school and now smoke weed while working at WalMart. I just finished my Bachelor's degree, the scars have faded, and miraculously, I still like camping. But people, seriously, be fucking careful when you're boozing around one.

~Jilly