“I Became Insane, With Long Intervals of Horrible Sanity.”

My dear friends, it has been a rough couple of weeks.

Some of you may know I have a twelve (almost thirteen) year-old daughter. She is wonderful and hilarious and loves horror movies and is basically everything one could want in a daughter.

On February 17th, we had a small kitchen fire that blackened our walls/ceiling, and melted a lot of plastic stuff. It started when a bit of oil splashed out of a pan, caught on the element, and built from there. My daughter was burned pretty badly trying to put it out. She had oil burns from fingertips to elbows on both arms, and second degree patches on her right thumb, wrist, and ring finger. I don’t know if any of you have ever experienced second degree burns, so let me tell you: they are terrible. They are very painful, and take forever to heal. My daughter has been a trooper the past few weeks through pain, open blisters, excruciating anxiety attacks, and a bunch of skin shedding. I’m not exaggerating when I say that her right arm looks like the fiji mermaid from The X-Files.

It’s been a long, slow, agonizing few weeks.

We are very thankful that her injuries are only second degree. They could have been a lot worse. She doesn’t need any kind of surgery, or skin graphs or anything like that, and none of the bad burns are deep enough to worry about movement or motor function. So let me say again, we are very lucky, all things considered, and we are very thankful.

That doesn’t make it any fucking easier to deal with though.

Understandably, this whole event has left my daughter with a little PTSD. It took a little while to manifest but it’s there, and it’s hard to communicate with her sometimes because I have no frame of reference. I’m just doing the best I can by cleaning and dressing the wounds, staying up with her when she needs it, comforting her when she breaks down–just being there.

There’s a lot of anxiety and underlying tension in the house right now. The baby (okay she’s not really a “baby” she’s a toddler) can feel it too so she’s turned into a tantrum monster. No seriously she screams at everything including routine diaper changes.

So, long story short: I am tired. I don’t like to complain about all this because I wasn’t the one that was injured, I’m not the one that’s in pain, but I really am ready to just crawl in a hole and sleep forever.

Hopefully you all are doing better than me and mine. I’m going to go home today and finish the second season of Altered Carbon (Omg Anthony Mackie is fucking great, but you know who’s better? Chris Conner. Seriously, just watch season 2 for Poe).