The human body is a magical creation, but there are certain things that it's really not good at. Dealing with extremely frigid temperatures is one of them. If the mercury drops below freezing, it can have some serious ramifications, as Australian Emma Quirk recently discovered upon traveling to the snow-swept wastes of Saskatchewan. Fair warning: this story is incredibly gross.
Here's how it starts: our female protagonist hit up the bar scene in the town of Prince Albert (the third-largest municipality in the province) with a pair of friends. Things got out of control, and by the time the clock struck midnight she was, in her own words, "blackout drunk." Without any money in her pocket or a working cell phone, she couldn't get home, so she just kept drinking.
The last time anybody saw her was at 2:30 in the morning, when she told the bar that she was heading out for a smoke. With no jacket or gloves, nobody thought she'd be out for long, and they were too wasted to notice when she didn't come back.
Three hours later, she was found curled in a ball in front of a nursing home, trying to sleep it off. And that's where the troubles really started.
You see, this young lady had been outside for long enough that frostbite set in. What's frostbite, you ask? As it gets cold, blood vessels close to the skin constrict, bringing warmth towards the core. This keeps your heart beating, so it's good. What's not good is the effect it has on your fingers, toes and other extremities. As they get colder, the skin and surface tissues freeze, and if it gets too cold muscle and other deep tissue can freeze as well.
Our girl got a variety of exposures, from "frostnip," which is the least damaging, all the way to fourth degree frostbite (which usually ends up in the patient getting something amputated). At the hospital, they dosed her up on morphine, cleaned her hands, and then brought in a specialist named Dr. Freezin. Yes, he really did have that ironic of a name.
The doctor told her that her hands were going to blister up massively, but under no circumstances was she to pop them, no matter how painful it got. And it got really painful. Frostbite is notorious for the extreme agony that it causes, and over the next few days our heroine had little else to do but pop painkillers and wait. The inflammation is caused by your body frantically trying to regrow the damaged tissue - think of it like healing a cut, but over all of the skin, not just a little bit.
The thing with blisters is, they get bigger and bigger as pus fills them. By the time the day came, they looked like bizarre alien fruits attached to her hands. She headed back to the hospital and had her gauze bandages unwrapped before the doctor came in to cut them open. She noticed that he was dressed in a huge apron with a face mask and a plastic shield covering his head.
And then he did the deed. She held her hands over a metal tray and, with a scalpel, Dr. Freezin unleashed a torrent of thick yellow pus from her swollen fingers all over the hospital room. After a few minutes, the loose skin deflated and she was ready to start the next phase of her treatment.
Her hands after the blisters were popped look like the mitts of a 100 year old woman. Amazingly enough, doctors believe she might even get to keep all of her fingers - the only ones still at risk are the left pinky and the tip of the right middle finger. It'll be June before doctors will be able to determine the full extent of the damage.
So let this be a lesson to you, my dudes: if you're going to get sloshed in a cold climate, bring a pair of mittens and some of those chemical handwarmers at the very least. You don't want to have to pay a visit to Dr. Freezin.
Via Imgur