Fighting Fire With Fire: Our First Guest President's Sphere
February 24, 2006
by Randy John South
 Randy John South, President of South Industries, Inc., Barry South, President of Dome Technology, and David B. South, President of Monolithic. These three brothers co-invented the Monolithic Dome. |
Editor's Note: We are NOT medical professionals and would advise you to contact your doctor at the first sign of any burn.
Marj, is my mother. Marj is always what she preferred being called by friends, family members and even her children. Sometimes my friends would imply that we might be a little disrespectful calling her by her first name, but that is truly what she asked us to call her. So out of respect to her wishes we called her Marj. Barney is our dad.
Marj told a peculiar story to us as we were growing up that seemed pretty incredible but I heard her tell it many times and I feel that I have it pretty straight.
Marj and Barney, one day when they were a fairly young married couple were out traveling the back country, likely hunting or fishing. It was getting late in the day and while being far off the beaten path they came across an old sheepherder with his sheep camp, dogs, sheep and the whole works. After introductions and visiting for a few minutes the old man invited Marj, and Barney to his camp fire dinner that night.
Marj turned up her nose a little at first but after some persuasion and comfort from Barney they decided to stay. Marj tells that she should never have turned up her nose, it was a delightful evening with great food prepared meticulously by a well practiced cook. The meat was lamb or mutton cut fresh from the carcass hanging in the back of the sheep camp. The man she learned was wise in many ways.
During the course of the cooking of the meat in an open frying pan on the fire, the old man unfortunately seared the flesh of his hand in a horrible manner. The old chef was using part of an old hand saw for a spatula to turn the meat in the frying pan. Somehow in his doings he had been disoriented some and had grabbed the hot end of the handless saw after it had been heated in the fire. Well it put a terrible burn on the old timers hand. We can all imagine the excruciating pain. What happened next was a bit of a miracle.
Marj described this carefully. The sheepherder would extend the open palm of his hand toward the fire increasing the temperature to his hand a little. It was obvious that the pain was intense. He would hold it there for a few seconds until the pain was more than he could bear and then he would withdraw till the pain subsided some. Then he would repeat the gesture. This went on for some time while Marj and Barney were wincing and watching with amazement. The incredible part was that after some time the man no longer cradled the hand in pain, no longer winced, but instead started working his fingers and within a not too terribly long period of time had full use of his hand and continued the evening as if nothing ever happened.
What an incredible story! “Fight fire with fire” the old man said.
Now my story begins. Soon after building some domes in Emmett, Idaho for a high school there I returned back to Menan, Idahoand was working in the shop in Idaho Falls. In Emmett we had put up a huge red iron structure in the class room dome that required a lot of welding, cutting and fitting with wide flange beams and steel joists. In that process many of us had certified in welding and learned about cutting torches that used propane instead of acetylene. When we were finished we brought that equipment back with us and started using it in the shop.
The day of the tragedy, Barry (my brother, and President of Dome Technology), not knowing about the switch up in torch configuration hooked an acetylene bottle of gas up to a propane burning torch and then he lit it on fire. Well, it just would not cut, so Barry turned the valves off to the torch, the flame appeared to have gone out but he could tell something was just not right.
He hollered over to me and asked that I might help him solve the problem and instantly I suspected that the torch had not been shut down properly. If a propane torch is not shut down with a very specific sequence the flame can travel backwards down the hoses towards the tanks. This was potentially a very dangerous situation!
I ran across the shop, reached over, and took the torch from Barry with my bare hand with the intent of getting it secured. Little did I know that the flame had been burning inside of the brass handle all of this time. This action seared the entire flesh of my right hand and fingers instantaneously with third degree burns! The pain was intense!
I sprinted to the lunch room of the shop whipped open the refrigerator door and slammed my hand down on the frost in the freezer compartment to get rid of the pain. What a relief. But now the agony set in that I had a bad burn and was likely to be days and maybe weeks without the full use of that hand. Not to mention the thought that I may have lasting scars.
It did not take me long to get real tired of standing there with my hand in the freezer so I decided to migrate to the restroom where I could run Idaho ice cold well water over the burned hand. In only seconds without ice water running over the burned hand the pain resumed to excruciating levels. So, after pulling up a chair I sat down never planning to move again. After what seemed to be a week, but what was in reality probably an hour, I was really bored. Just sitting there allowed me to solve the problems of the world, and after those few minutes I started dreaming and remembering and theorizing on all sorts of stuff.
Somewhere in that dreaming, remembering and theorizing stage I remembered the story Marj told often about the old sheepherder and “Fight fire with fire”, and in the theorizing stage the thought occurred to me that I might put the firefighting to the test. What else was there to do? The only moveable toy within my reach was the hot water valve.
My experimenting went like this: I turned the hot water valve on ever so slightly until the water became just a little warmer than Idaho ice cold. The pain would rise immediately, but I would grit my teeth until my eyes would water and then turn the warm back off. And after a few minutes, I turned the hot water on again and repeated the last step and lasted it out a little longer. After doing this step repeatedly for a long, long time it was evident that the pain was not so intense with warmer temperature water. So: Again I would turn on warmer water still and let it run longer still until the pain got so bad that I would have to go back to icy cold for relief. Then again, I would repeat the process with each time a little longer duration with the heat on.
Now keep in mind that this process was taking a lot of time. However, I started to notice that I could hold my hand under water that was luke warm continuously and could stand the pain. Consequently what followed was just inching up the temperature gradually as I could stand the pain until the water over my burned hand was actually hotter than what was comfortable with the left hand which had not grown accustomed to that high temperature.
My reasoning concluded that once the water temperature running over the burn was hotter than the temperature of the blood in my blood stream the fire in the burn was gone. This process took several hours and most of the afternoon but when I got to that point, I turned off the water, dried off the water and to my amazement: The pain was gone…….. forever!
The evidence of the burn was gone with the exception of a little discoloration of the skin and, I put on a pair of gloves and went back to work! Talk about amazed co-workers that had seen my burned hand a few hours earlier! They could not believe it either except I was standing there with hardly any evidence of ever being burned.
I later learned that the outer skin had actually been destroyed because after about two weeks the skin started to fall off. But right up until that time it had shrunk up tight onto the flesh underneath and had acted like a protective covering or bandage.
Since that Time
Since the time of this painful experience, I have used this method to help in the healing process of burns on myself or burns on some of my children no less than two dozen times. Here are a few examples:
1. Once when Josh (my son) was about a year old he reached up on Sunday morning while we were frantically getting ready for church and grabbed Karen’s branding hot curling iron that was setting on the toilet tank in the bathroom. The poor screaming kid was not even old enough to talk. Consequently I did the burn treatment with cold and warm water with him alternating temperatures regulated by his intensity of crying. We missed the first meeting or two of church but that was the end of the burn, pain and all.
2. Another time while acting as Scoutmaster and camping up to Paul’s Reservoir, Jon, who was about nine or ten, younger than scout age, nevertheless, with his dad camping, suffered a bad burn in the campfire while cooking breakfast. With lake water as the cold and water heated on the fire as the warm. We soaked Jon’s hand alternately in different mess kits until the pain was completely gone and there was not any evidence that a burn had ever occurred.
3. One time, while I was out dome building in another part of the country, we went to church in the unfamiliar local ward. During sacrament meeting I noticed the lady in front of me sending her young scout age son out of the meeting every ten minutes or so where he would return with a handful of sopping wet towels from the restroom.
Well it did not take long to figure out that the lady had a bad burn on her hand from before church. When the meeting was over I leaned forward and learned she had seared her thumb while browning a roast that morning. As quickly as was possible I told her how to pull the fire out of the burn and then went on to Sunday School.
A few days later, and after this lady had done some real searching to find the migrant dome builders, she called me and thanked me profusely for enlightening her about “fight fire with fire”. Then raved about the success she had after church in getting totally rid of the pain.
4. A few times in my life when my smart thinking was on vacation I have allowed myself to get really sunburned. On one occasion Karen and I were with Garth and Bonnie Gunderson snorkeling on the beach near Honolulu. I had been face down for way too long with what started out to be Lilly white legs had what turned out to be the Crimson tide. Only the “fight fire with fire” treatment in the shower allowed me to continue a splendid vacation in Hawaiiwith the princess Karen (my wife).
This bit of nifty medical treatment really works! You can get a similar testimonial from each of my kids as they all; unfortunately, have had to use it at one time or another. This discovery is a gift to you. If you have any questions please ask.
Randy 208 754 4422 randy@southsinc.com
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