A Most Accidental Injury

The lunchtime presentations also known as opportunities for tea, a chair and a fan, happen in an impossibly small and stuffy room on the top floor. Me and Lou did a presentation on non-accidental injury on tuesday; in striking contrast to England in the aftermath of baby P this subject is rarely covered here and most of the junior doctors were unfamiliar with the term. Whether it doesn't happen as much, whether it is not reported as much, whether it is tolerated more, I'm not sure, but definitely in terms of incidence it pales in comparison to accidental injury. Accidents happen all the time here, among children and adults.

So when on the tuesday evening a call came to go to A&E to clerk an 11 year old boy who'd been electrocuted there was a collective sinking of hearts and steeling of nerves. Only two days before we'd seen the terribly blistered and burned lips and mouth of a two year old who'd eaten caustic soda, so there was a group sigh when we found the boy alert and sitting up, with not even a glimmer of a hair standing on end.

As the history unravelled, I thought I must have misunderstood; I double checked with the doctor and tried not to giggle: a history of a most accidental injury. The boy had stuck his head in the freezer and started licking the walls, a fault in the wiring gave him an electric shock and he had to be pull out by his brother. He'd somehow come away pretty much unscathed, except for having a very fat tongue, which meant he had to spend the next day on the ward looking sheepish and dribbling.

I learnt that licking the inside of the freezer isn't safe, that having a fat tongue makes you dribble and that it's nice to occasionally have a case you want to laugh about instead of cry.