Jake's burn story

So...Jake's burn story. He was camping with some of his friends last Saturday night, and they all had to go to ACYF day in Bloomington the next morning. So their host's parents told them they had to be in bed by midnight. I guess they were playing with gas and fire all night, including spearing an empty pop can with a hotdog stick and pouring gas over the campfire to watch the fireball. Very dumb, but they are 17 year old males, and it doesn't surprise me.

Sometime after midnight (willfully disobeying their curfew) they chased a ground hog or something similar into a hole. It had two openings so they decided to smoke it out. Jake, Fred, and Justin were in charge of making the smoke, and Dan was at the other end with a shotgun.

They had some newspaper down in the hole, and they decided that it would light better if it was soaked with gasoline. You would think that anybody with half a brain would not be stupid enough to throw a match down a hole with straight gas at the bottom. Or at least stand a short distance away. But no, all three were right up around the hole and of course it flared up. All three got burnt, one lost all the hair on his arms, but his shaggy hair saved his face. Jake has whisker marks from shutting his eyes.

So then, instead of going into the house and getting medical attention, they decided that they didn't want to get in trouble for being up past midnight and just splashed some lake water on their 2nd degree burns and spent the rest of the night in the woods. They did go up to the shed to get steel brushes to brush the burnt hair out so they didn't have to smell it!?

Jake showed up for ACYF day the next morning and one of the Bible class teachers, who is a Doctor, told him to go back home and keep it cold and moist. He got him some burn cream to put on it too. So he's been sitting around the house watching DVD's on my laptop for a few days. It looks a little bit better now, he still looks like he's wearing war paint. :) Or a butterfly. And he has to wrap his head in bandages before he goes to bed.