>>>DO NOT READ IF YOU ARE SQUEAMISH WHEN IT COMES TO STORIES INVOLVING BLOOD, CUTS, ETC.
Several weeks ago, Jaiden had a really bad fall. She scraped up her nose, hand, and knee and at the time of the fall there was a lot of blood. Our neighbor, Pak Putuh, was passing by at the time and helped Kristi and Jaiden back to our house on his motorbike. At the sight of all the blood and hearing Jaiden's screams, I instantly assumed the worst and starting overreacting in nearly every way imaginable.
After the initial excitement/terror subsided, we got her cleaned up. Feeling that alcohol would be too painful to use in cleaning the wounds, I went out in search for some good old hydrogen peroxide. For all the chemistry whizzes out there, you know that hydrogen peroxide is H2O2. I am not a chemistry whiz (sorry Mr. Corbett), so when I couldn't find the name for it in our English Indonesia dictionary, I had to resort to trying to explain to the pharmacist what hydrogen peroxide was, what it was used for, how it bubbled, etc. He got the idea and said, "Ya, ya. Hah Doo-uhh Oh Doo-uh (Which is the Indonesian way to say H2O2)". He handed me an unlabeled bottle full of clear liquid, and I bought it.
Feeling good about my Indonesian ability and my parenting skills, I went home to clean up the cuts. Jaiden was afraid it would hurt, so we explained to her how it would look really cool watching her cuts bubble up and how we used to enjoy it as kids. So I poured some on and she screamed and squirmed like I was pouring toxic acid on her... She really went nuts. But we insisted that she was overreacting and that she had to clean out her cuts. Several times that day we used the H2O2, and each time she went absolutely bonkers. It even got to the point to where we had to discipline her for her "overreacting". We kept on saying, "Hydrogen Peroxide doesn't hurt, it just bubbles and cleans the cut." After a day of that agonizing process, I used some of the H2O2 on myself. I felt like my skin was melting! It was really, really painful and the pain just didn't go away.
I quickly looked up Hydrogen Peroxide on Wikipedia, and it said that domestic uses of H2O2 are diluted to 3%. Concentrations higher than that will make it an "aggressive oxidizer and will corrode many materials, including human skin." We could confirm that last statement by experience. So we naturally assumed that I had bought an undiluted bottle of H2O2... It would have been helpful to have that information about 12 hours earlier!
We felt really bad, and we apologized to Jaiden multiple times for putting her through that agony. But she had a good attitude about it in the end, even wanting me to put a picture on the blog of her scrapes.
