Sunday Funnies; Volume 48.

Click on image to enlarge Once upon a time, a time when I still had most of my hair.......

You might recall that last week I said I had a disastrous first date story that would top the one that Jay Leno came across on his show. Here it is. It happened one August when I was 23. I was working full time as an LPN (in those days, ex-Navy corpsmen could legally "challenge" the state LPN boards and become licensed) in a private psychiatric hospital in Savannah and attending Armstrong College. There was an attractive brunette, home from UGA for the summer, who would visit one of her girl friends who was an in patient. One day, my home phone rang. It was said brunette. We'll call her Jane. She wanted to know if I cared to get together for coffee to discuss her friend. I told her I could not do that (discuss the friend's case) but wondered if she would be interested in dinner and a movie. She was. I set the date for a Saturday night. I told her that she might want to eat a late lunch insofar as we were going to an early movie followed by a late supper. After the movie, we went back to my apartment. I had prepared a great recipe I had for marinated shrimp. They had been in a jar in the refrigerator for a couple of days. All I had to do was open a bottle of white wine, fix a salad, warm up a can of Cross and Blackwell lobster bisque, and fry up some small hush puppies (dipped with a melon ball scoop). We were drinking a glass of wine while I was cooking. The apartment was on the second floor of an old two story house in mid-town Savannah (East Broad and 38th). There was a window unit at the opposite end of the apartment. With the gas burner on and it being August, it was a little warm in the kitchen. I was standing at the stove, turning the hush puppies, which were frying in a large, cast iron skillet. Jane had just finished setting the table when she asked if there was anything else she could do to help. I asked her to stand off to the side of the stove (it was at the end of the limited counter space) and hold the plate I was going to put the hush puppies on. So, there she stood, just to my left, holding the plate. One second, I was looking down at the hush puppies turning golden brown in the hot oil. In the next instant, I was looking at the back of her head. She had fainted and fallen face first into the hot oil! As luck would have it, she had her beautiful, long hair in two braided pig tails. I instantly grabbed a pig tail in each hand and pulled her out of the frying pan. She slumped to the floor, unconscious. She had hot grease on her face and dripping down onto her blouse. I darted into the bathroom and grabbed a towel to get the grease off. In the seconds I was gone, she had regained consciousness and was up on her hands and knees, crawling around, trying to pick up the spilled hush puppies. I grabbed her under her armpits and stood her up. By this time, the skin on her face had largely sloughed off. I blotted grease off of her face, then quickly removed her blouse and bra. The whole time, she was still sort of out of it and apologizing profusely for having dropped the hush puppies. I picked her up in my arms and rushed to the bathroom where I got into a cold shower with her, clothes and all. As you will know, if you've had first aid training, the idea was to stop some of the tissue damage that was still occurring by cooling the burned areas. After a while in the shower, I sat her down in a chair while I raced downstairs to my car to retrieve my well stocked first aid kit. Luckily, I had a full tube of Tetracaine topical anesthetic ointment. I applied that top her burned areas. Though she was not complaining of pain, I knew that as soon as the shock wore off, she would have been. She had classic second degree burns of the face and some second and first degree areas on her chest. Facial skin, from forehead to chin, was hanging loose. I asked her if she wanted to go to the ER or if she wanted me to call her parents, or what. She said that no, I seemed to know what I was doing, that her parents were used to her sometimes staying out all night, and that she could not deal with how freaked out they would be just yet. That being the case, I pulled out my minor surgical set and carefully debrided (removed) the devitalized skin and applied more Tetracaine ointment. I assured her that I was very familiar with the progression of the healing process for her type of burn (and I was, after working for six months in the Hoa Khan Children's Hospital, just north of DaNang, where I had debrided numerous similar burns - and much worse ones.) I told her that she had just received a low budget "facial peel" and that she would look even more gorgeous when the new skin grew back. The Tetracaine was working. She was feeling no pain. So, we sat down to eat. By this time, her lips had swollen to the point it looked like she had two cocktail weenies glued to her face. When your face is numbed, you tend to stick yourself in the face with your fork, which she did. I offered to feed her, but she would have none of it. Finally, she discovered that by holding the fork in both hand at arms length and following it intently, she could hit her mouth. During dinner, she told me that not only had she not heeded my advice about a late lunch, but that she had been on a rather strict diet and had spent most of that day on the beach in the hot sun. That, combined with a glass of wine on an empty stomach in a hot kitchen explained the fainting. So, anyway, she spent the night with me. I did my best to keep her mind off of her burns. The next morning, we got up late. I fixed breakfast. Her lips were still hugely swollen. Around noon, we arrived at her parent's house. She let herself in the front door with her key. She asked me to come in for support. When she walked in on her parents in the kitchen, the mother, a nurse, let out a scream. The father, a dentist, took one look at me standing behind her and began agitatedly walking in a tight circle, slamming his fist into his hand and grunting. Jane told them to calm down, that she was alright. She explained what had happened, that it was not my fault, and that I had taken good care of her. Her mother immediately got all pissy and insisted that I write down just exactlty what I had done "to" her. I did, in the correct medical terminology. It turned out that her father was retired military. They took Jane (who was, as a 21 year old, dependent college student, still covered on base) to the hospital at Hunter Army Airfield. Jane asked me to come along. So, we all sat in the ER waiting area until the nurse called Jane in to see the doctor. After a few minutes, the doctor came out and, with a puzzled look on his face, said to her parents, "There's really nothing more I can do for her. Did y'all just want a second opinion, or what? I mean, she's already seen doctor, right?" Mom shot me a nasty look. I just grinned back at her. So, we drove back to their house, Mom and Dad in their car, Jane and I in mine. Mom and Dad immediately retreated to the back part of the house. Jane thanked me for taking such good care of her and walked me to the front door. As I was leaving, I again reassured her that before she knew it she would look just fine. And then - in one of those moments that you think only could happen on a sit-com, knowing that she was dreading the crap she was about to catch from her parents, I actually uttered the words, "Keep a stiff upper lip." Jane soon went on back to college. We never dated again. However, about a year later, I saw her out with another guy. She looked great.