Surprise!
Saleh Hadri got a surprise when he tried to turn himself in for murder. The police told him they were closed and that he should go away. So he, and the reporter he was with, wandered around Sweden for a bit until they found a police station that was open and then he turned himself in. He claims he is innocent and wants to clear his name.
Read that again. A wanted murder suspect couldn’t even get a cop to escort him to an open jail. He had to find one himself. After all that I really hope he is innocent. As you might imagine, Swedish officials say this shouldn’t have happened and they are going to look into it. Eventually.
That is one mellow country.
A little closer to home eleven year old Ireland Lane, an Oregon native, went to the doctor because she had an upset tummy. So the doctor gave her some anti-acids and she was fine.
Just kidding, she had cancer.
SURPRISE!
But God wasn’t done with her yet. She fell down and went boom and ended up back in the hospital with a bump on her head.
No, that’s not the reason I’m writing about her. I am writing about her because she cleaned her hands and then the hand sanitizer caught fire and nearly killed her. You can’t make this stuff up even if you try.
Eleven-year-old cancer patient Ireland Lane, who was in the hospital after she fell and hurt her head at school, is recuperating from third degree burns after her shirt lit on fire in her hospital room — and according to reports, hand sanitizer may have been to blame.
The Oregonian first reported on the incident, which occurred Feb. 2 at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital. According to the newspaper’s report, Ireland’s father, Stephen, was sleeping in his daughter’s hospital room when he heard her screams. He found her in the hallway, her shirt on fire, and immediately took action to smother the flames.
His daughter still suffered third degree burns and is now recovering from those at the Legacy Oregon Burn Center, ABC News reported.
The Oregonian reports how hand sanitizer may have played a role in the whole incident:
Ireland was due to leave the hospital the day of the fire. The last thing she recalls that day is using sanitizer to clean the table that rolled over her bed, where she had painted a wooden box as a gift for her nurses. Ireland’s father recalls that before the fire, she was playing, making static electricity with the sheets on her bed. He’d never heard of that being a danger, let alone causing a fire.
Hand sanitizer and static electricity “are definitely part of the investigation,” Oregon State Fire Marshal spokesman Rich Hoover told NBC News.
“I’ve been in medicine going back 30 years now and never heard anything like this. And hopefully I never will again,” Dr. Stacy Nicholson, who is the assistant chief at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, told KATU.
Staff at Doernbecher, which is considered a Oregon Health & Science University facility, already follows strict fire safety procedures, the Oregonian reported. The maker of the hand sanitizer used by the hospital, called Avagard D, told the newspaper that its product is safe when used as directed.
According to NBC News, the alcohol content in the hand sanitizer used at the hospital is around 60 percent.
Hand sanitizers used for health care purposes are recommended to contain 60 to 95 percent ethanol or isopropanol in order to be effective, according to the Food and Drug Administration. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends using alcohol-based hand sanitizers to clean hands if it’s not possible to wash up with soap and water.
Because of hand sanitizer’s high alcohol content, some state fire marshals even have guidelines in properly storing it. In Kansas, the fire marshal recommends that a maximum of 1.2 liters of hand sanitizer be stored in a dispenser in a health-care setting, and that there must be at least four feet between dispensers. And if the dispenser is installed on a wall over carpet, then there must be an automatic sprinkler system installed.
I have to admit that the amount of time I had spent thinking about hand sanitizers was akin to the amount of time I spent wondering what I’d look like dressed as Ru Paul. Maybe not even that much. Okay, let’s be honest, I never think about them.
I know that if healthy people use them too often they kill useful bacteria and leave themselves open to all sorts of deadly diseases. Which I’ve always thought of as evolution in action. And the people who do so, in the name of health they don’t understand, never see the irony of their lives. They will gleefully scarf up ounce and after ounce of live bacteria and swallow them whole. This is also known as yogurt. But these same people will scrub themselves so clean as to leave no protection when they are injured or sick.
Okay, back to the young lady. I’m not sure words can describe the horror she must have gone through. Follow up reports say that she is going to be okay and that she seems ahead of the game when it comes to her cancer. I hope so. That kid’s had enough surprises for one life.
Out Of A Forest from Tobias Gundorff Boesen on Vimeo.
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