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Mate, burns are really serious and infections are super easy. Sounds like both should have been doctors visits at the very least.
How about consulting a professional rather than a bike forum 😅
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Useful search terms for understanding wound healing are the difference between 'healing by primary intention' where the edges of a wound can close, and 'secondary intention' where there is loss of material so new tissue must form to close the wound. Burns usually the latter, which is much slower to heal, prone to infection and scarring. Fun.
IME YMMV IANAD, but based on numerous manual work hand injuries treated by doctors (sanding through a thumbnail, etc):
Plasters are shit, use non-adhering compresses drenched in disinfectant cream and bandages to secure them in place. You need an annoying amount of bandages for even quite small hand injuries because they fall off otherwise (e.g. for thumb might have to be secured around wrist). Even if you are just in a big bandage for 3-4 days, it will really help the healing of the thumb burn. After that you can decide to use smaller dressings on a cost-benefit analysis.
Wet is good for secondary intention healing, new tissue can only grow in the wet, but it must be thoroughly disinfected and well covered (I use iodine baths and then loads of iodine cream, but then I live in Germany). Change dressing every few days. If wounds have dried out, you can dress and cover and they will go soft again, which IME is good. Loose blisters, just disinfect and dress.
Any sensation of heat, pain, swelling, stiffness, redness, signs of infection = doctor
After a while you get a sense of what helps your healing, when is the right time to remove dressings and let things dry out a bit. Happy healing!
edit: just seen your photos... TLDR they look fine, next time maybe try keeping moist and disinfected for a day or two to get a shorter overall healing timeframe.
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Soul
Jackolas
@M_V
Any burns knowledge in here?
I've done my left hand twice recently and not sure if I'm doing the best job of looking after the injuries.
I didn't do anything to either burn immediately because they were both pretty bad so I figured the damage was done. Plus I did them in my garage which has no running water etc. And also I'm dumb.
1st injury was that I licked the flame from my oxy-propane torch across the top of my thumb. The skin split from the get go so it didn't form a blister. It was a bit mushy(?) looking but doing ok until I bumped it while working on a bike and that pulled some of the mushy skin off. I wrapped it up in a plaster but that seemed to be keeping it moist and the plaster pulled some tissue or whatever from the open area so today I've allowed to to dry out and it's sort of formed a scab. I was thinking that letting it scab would be the best way to get a protective layer on it and get it healing? It's still very tender.
2nd injury was grabbing a steerer tube that I'd been brazing into a crown, I didn't realise it would be so hot, the sizzle of skin was what alerted me.
In this case it's the inside of my thumb, middle, ring and pinky fingers that are injured. There are blisters but they seem to be pretty sturdy (I'm presuming because of the condition of the skin in these areas) except for the pinky which has burst and peeled slightly. I've been wearing a plaster around that one but taken it off as was starting to feel itchy where the adhesive was and it's all looking a bit wet and the skin that was over the blister seems quite loose.
Photos available but not posted yet in order to avoid peeps seeing their dinners again.