Last week I burned the back of my hand with dry ice in a school chemistry lab. Just a small area, maybe the size of a dime. The circle of skin where the ice was turned totally white at first, but then after it warmed back up I was left with just a small round pink spot on my hand. It didn't hurt, so I forgot about it for a while. The skin wasn't even broken at all. The next day, I realized that the reason it didn't hurt was because it was completely numb. It looked really mild but the skin was dead and had no feeling. After about 4-5 days the area became darker red and sunken-looking compared to the rest of my hand. Then the skin turned brown and a scab formed over the outer edge of the circle.
Today (8th day after it happened) the edges of the scab started peeling, and when I pulled on it a little, the entire thing peeled off. The area underneath is bright red, raw, and the center has a small "hole" that looks deeper than the rest of it. The skin is really shiny and unnatural like a burn scar, but it doesn't look infected. I put Neosporin and a band-aid over it, but I'm wondering if it will finish healing quickly by itself, or if there's anything else I should be doing? What degree of frostbite is this? Does it sound like it will leave a permanent scar? (I'm just kind of having a delayed freak-out about it, because I didn't realize a tiny little piece of ice could leave such a nasty-looking mark on my hand.)
EDIT: Is my description of it too graphic? I posted in a lot of detail so I could get better advice, because I'm honestly not sure if this is serious or not, or if it just looks worse than it is. Wanted to check and make sure I wasn't triggering anyone or something.
Thanks for the answers. I think I should have gotten this checked out soon after it happened, when I realized the area was numb. But I just kind of waited through it, and I think that now there's no reason to go to a doctor? If I go to student health services to get it checked out, they'll bill my parents, and my mother will force me to tell her what happened. Then she'll start saying I'm too much of a idiot to do scientific research in the future if I think it's a good idea to put dry ice on my hand. She probably won't understand that I did it on purpose, because I was in an awful mood and pissed that my lab partners were ignoring me through the whole 4 hour chem lab. (The funny part is, I had chem lab again this Tuesday, and when my lab partners saw my hand they were all morbidly curious to see what the injury looked like after a week. And yet they didn't say a word to me the week before when they saw me standing there touching a hazardous substance. Wow...)
Anyways... Hopefully I don't need to go to student health at all. The frostbite looks a lot better today after the dead skin came off and I bandaged it with ointment overnight. It's now pink instead of bright red, and the little "hole" is almost closed. Now I've just got to figure out if this is permanent scar tissue, or just new skin that's growing to replace the frostbitten part...
I've done this before. I didn't get it checked out but it did heal over time. You should treat the frost bite like a burn. If it gets worse then get it checked out. Mine wasn't numb for long - so maybe its a good idea to see a doctor. You could perhaps tell the chemistry teacher, who might have an idea what to do as they have risk assessments for the materials used, but they will probably tell you to see a doctor.
Cold burns can take up to 24-48 hours to fully 'develop' (reach their worst?) so its always important to get them checked out early on as they can get worse. As others have said; treat it like any other burn. The fact its red is a good sign; the paler it is, the deeper it tends to be.
Now, the best thing to do would be to keep the burn clean and get it properly dressed (as some dressings can massively reduce the risk of scarring). I don't know about the USA, but here you can get pretty awesome advice from pharmacists about dressings and stuff.
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Get it checked out, it takes a long time for frostbite to heal, the damaged skin will die and either slab or slide off it's blistered, it's really unpleasant and can smell disgusting. They tend to get worse before they get better.
Please don't do it again, it's easy to do more damage than you realise and it could escalate to you needing a skin graft and from personal experience I can tell you that that definitely won't help your feelings long term.
Best of luck, please get it checked!
"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary-wise; what it is it wouldn't be, and what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?" - Alice, Alice in Wonderland
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