Other than keeping a CLOSE eye on my hand. Still not healed. Bit worried that the wounds are a little itchy, but not to panic levels yet.

Especially when it's the right hand, especially given the timing and severity, and especially given the care.

My bandages don't stay on. For tae kwon do, this is understandably a little bit of an awkward thing. I tried everything to not have them fall apart on me, but nothing. The bandages were designed to last all day, and even be reappliable. Reusing the same one for days, allegedly. Yet in less than six hours, they fall apart. I'll apply a brand new bandage, nice and snug, and at the time it'll seem fine, but again, less than six hours later...bam. Loosey goosey.

Little bit frustrating to deal with especially when they limit what tasks you can do. I have almost full mobility on my hands, but I still need to apply caution all the same, and eating's a royal pain. Altogether, there's just a lot with the hand which is just...ugg, can it just be healed already?

The thumb blister is fairly flat, probably because it has drained itself out of the fluids within; the ring finger never had a blister be elevated even though I could tell there was one. But the two pinkie blisters are still large and strong. And the non-raised blisters are still there so I'm not healed yet.

No pain.

Treatment more of an annoyance than anything else.

But still not going to be recovered as soon as I'd like.

No pain anymore, though dressing the wound is annoying. I can't get the breathable bandage stuff (forget its name) to stay on, no matter what tricks I try. Even the original dressing (which was supposed to last 12 hours) had one or two of the three bandages not last that long, and it was done by the doctor rather than by me (who is considerably less competent at the task, apparently).

Oh well.

Apparently the dressing is optional; the ointment's the important part and I'm applying it.

​Here's to hoping for a speedy recovery.

My sister thought it'd be a good idea and volunteered to drive me, so I figured might as well.
They confirmed the obvious; I have second-degree burns.
They updated my td shot, and showed me how to apply the ointment I'm to use (which they gave a prescription for), and also how to wrap the bandages.

I could probably have done most of this on my own.
But it helps for them to give me all of the right supplies, with a demonstration of proper use of them.
So, not a wasted trip, since I'm pretty sure we only had like half the stuff needed at most. And there's a difference between knowing the theory and having the reality.

All-around, glad I went; I didn't feel like I wasted time in doing so.

So it turns out things are worse than I thought.

I have four blisters.
Two on the pinkie, one of which is both ginormous and also awkwardly positioned.
One on the ring finger, which is actually the least-terribly-off of the blisters surprisingly enough given I thought it'd be the worst.
And one on my thumb which is gigantic and, disconcertingly, in two hours, over doubled in size.

And worst of all?

Every single one of them shows evidence of having burst.

With the other three, this evidence was minute; the bandaids having liquid which shouldn't have been there, an icky gooey texture that didn't look like it was from the stickiness innate in a bandaid.

But with my thumb, the evidence is ongoing as it is still. leaking. Continuously.

​I've reached out to as many sources as I can to find out what to do as I have no clue.

...But hoh boy is it by far the most painful. Hurts like a capital-b-witch.

The pain comes in waves, too. I'll be in a lull: not fine, but with less pain...and then...bam. Heavy, constant wave after wave of excruciatingly painful sensations flowing throughout my hand. I'm pretty sure that also feeling cold is a very bad sign for burns and yet sometimes my hand feels like it's freezing instead of burning. And then it goes straight back into feeling like it is on fire again.

Heck, I might be feeling it shoot up my arm; there's sensations somewhere further up, maybe elbow, maybe armpit, where I feel something there, but eh, that could be entirely unrelated. Pretty sure it wasn't there before, tho, and yet is there now. Could be as simple a matter of me subconsciously positioning my hand/arm differently and that affecting blood circulation/flow in the arm, but still it's annoying because everything is hurting.

I have a high pain tolerance.

None of this pain is actually debilitating. It is ow. It is hurt. On a scale of 1 to 10, it's at least a solid six, maybe even seven. But as much as it is YE GODS hurt, pain, ow, suffering...I know that it's not a true ten level of debilitating, crushing, destroying, life-wrecking pain because it's just not that bad.

It's bad.

Really bad.

But I can manage.

Doesn't stop it from being annoying.

Painkillers are, admittedly.
A little tempting.

It's a bad enough pain that I know that a good, solid, 90-97% of people experiencing it with easy, cheap, readily available access to painkillers.
Would take those painkillers.

But again, I have a high pain tolerance, ridiculously high pain tolerance, so while it hurts...I'll live.

I'll still whine like a baby about it, tho.
Constantly complain about how much it hurts.

Because, yeah.
This is definitely the worst burn that I've ever had.
I've had a lot of burns, mind you. But this is unambiguously definitively the worst I've ever experienced, no doubt about it.

​So I'm gonna keep moaning about it in the hopes that complaining helps lessen the pain.

You know why?

Because my right hand basically is on fire.
Almost literally.

It's bandaged up pretty badly right now as the after-effect of treating my severe burns. Thumb, ring, pinkie fingers, all nailed and nailed BADLY. Used six bandages and all that to get close to covered. After applying neosporin, which my mom actually knew the location of.

Adrenaline's wearing off now, so all I feel is hotness and ow and pain and pain and more pain and ow tomorrow's gonna suck and I wonder if anyone at work will even notice/question the bandaid-laden hand and for that matter whether the bandaids will even stick that long.

​All around owness.

It's a good one, too, but I'm not sure how to schedule the time out for actually getting it done. When I start doing art, I want a solid bloc of time, where I start on the art and do nothing else until I finish the art. Anything less than that is considerably sub-optimal, to say the least, and the quality of the art will be vastly affected as a result. I thought I might be able to manage it today, but no, I got distracted doing work on the civ 3 mod (not a bad thing, mind you, as that is a project I need to work on; I finished implementing buildings and played around with pcx editing; I currently have one horrifically botched pcx file edited and I need to closely investigate the trick to make it not be botched since I've read about the method but don't quite understand it).

I'm not sure how long it'll take me to complete it, either. It'll be a full-torso, most-of-arms drawing taking up a full sketchbook page, and I'll need to gather up a ton of reference images to pull it off right. Multiple hours is the estimate, and I need to go to bed at midnight, so even if I started it now, not sure I'd finish. (Also, I'm typing this blog before I eat, at 8:40ish, so that's your reference point.)

Basically, my idea this time is to revisit a little-known piece of art I did before I even knew I was a girl. I'm not even sure I'd be able to find the original piece of art, it might be permanently lost to the ages, and was only posted in one place as far as I can recall, a site of someone who was a vague associate (not really even a friend).

What I'm aiming for is to redo that, and have it be more complete.
The original drawing I did was a combination of my two widely-used avatars at the time.
On mastin2 (this is so old that it predates the trololol avatar I later used), and on all Mastin accounts, I originally used the same avatar, originating back from my days on the battleon forums. The signature grin of the ebil (not a typo) blue moglin Zorbak, the Zorbak grin as I believe the filename is technically called.

It is the signature look of Mastin/mastin2, even if people don't think about it now as being so. Here, have a look.

...That would be a yes, I do have it.
​The original original (which I don't have anymore) said 'For SCIENCE!', and after I came out, it was kinda a big deal, so I changed my avatar (and what it said) appropriately so to match that. (And, yes, this is the much, much, much better done version. I could track down some horrific pictures of the original version but I much prefer to focus on this more refined version even if this refined version isn't perfect.)

The drawing that I want to redo combined both of them; I made a fullbody furry scientist, blue fur, semi-transparent, semi-opaque glasses, labcoat, bunny ears, red eyes, a full hybrid of the two, but again, image probably lost to the ages and even if not, was before I realized I am a girl.

Additionally.

It was before Red Hood Rider.

Ruby has since become one of my signature avatars. Black Ruby has replaced upside-down Argus as the most-used image of myself (though that's slightly debatable; upside-down Argus is pretty much mostly my gravatar image and lots of sites use gravatar), and I've used other versions of Ruby as my avatar as well.

I genuinely think that it'd be possible for me to draw an image (not meant as an avatar) that would hybridize all three designs; the anthropomorphic bunny with the ebil grin, the scientist, and Ruby. The scientist look is (minus the glasses and labcoat), mind you, meant to be an accurate representation of me; keep in mind that for the longest time, I had a ponytail on the back rather than...the thing I do now. (Is it a pigtail? A side-ponytail? I honestly don't know.)

What I have in mind is difficult. What I have in mind would take effort. And it'd be easy to screw up, so much needs to go right for it to work well. But I genuinely think I can do it, if I can set aside the time for it.

It will look so cool if done right, even in just the black and white of pencil.

But I need to actually do it and nail it​ in order for it to work that way.

When you go out of your way to watch MSI games (with no need for it) and you play a few matches on your own (also with no need for it), what else can be said of you other than exactly that?

Unfortunately, I don't remember most of the details and the details I do remember, I mostly remember because they were contradictory as far as narratives go--not "in dream logic, this made sense" contradictory. Outright complete contradiction; it was me spotting this plot hole (and yes it was an outright well and true, proper, plot hole) that woke me up, in fact. Because it was just that jarring of a contradiction, one no amount of dream logic could write off.

Still!

It was a lovely dream all the same until said contradiction came to my attention.

I know that the dream took large, LARGE inspiration from The Promised Neverland. A group of kids were being hunted, trying to escape, from a monster, and were living in an oppressive society of some sort. There was a small contradiction in that originally the monster hunting them wasn't part of said society and later in the dream monsters such as the one hunting them were common; there was a small contradiction in that originally the monster was hunting only one human with said human's death motivating the escape of the others, and then later it being the monster hunting them all with one human caught (in both instances, a surviving kid vowed revenge), but these?

These were dream logic errors that I didn't realize until just now when trying to type out the narrative and finding it less coherent than I remembered even given the glaring error. I think the setting stayed the same, though; it was a dream-labyrinth mall. Which is exactly what it sounds like; a mall, as shown through a dream, in such a way that navigating it was like navigating a labyrinth.

I believe that stayed consistent.

Later in the dream, there was a shift of perspective, however. We went from following the escaping kids to, after the ghost of their deceased comrade came back to warn them, following the ghost--ghosts in this dream world setting are restless spirits but are treated as a whole different class with almost equal power to the ruling class...because of their innate abilities to cause incredible harm if they weren't given that status.

They have common ghost powers; flight, intangibility, and have some unspecified further abilities, not to mention, can travel fast. Uniquely, there exists a way for ghosts to inhabit a tangible form, which travels with them when they go intangible, but these bodies are not something that come from the ghost themselves; they are manufactured. (Basically, said manufactured bodies are 'possessed', and once possessed, they travel with the ghost even when the ghost is using their ghostly powers.)

The ghost of the kid stole a body to possess that they weren't meant to have, and was able to warn the group, but had to leave them to not be exposed and played the part of a genuinely new ghost proven worthy of having that body, or something like that.

However, this focus on the ghost proved to be the dream's undoing, because it exposed the contradiction I couldn't reconcile. The ghost was a girl, and in at least one version, it was a girl killed...but in at least one version, the version that I believe came first, it was a guy who was killed. And realizing this made me endlessly try and loop back to that scene, to play it forth and figure out, "was it a guy who was killed, or a girl who was killed?" and I couldn't figure it out because I think it kept changing originally and this is what caused the dream to basically explode as I was catapulted awake in confusion and disappointment.

Because it was a good dream, darnit, even if it was filled to the brim with blatant continuity errors.

If the dream had kept going, I'd have explored the society via the ghost more, and then maybe looped back to the characters, with them meeting back up at some point. At least, that's my theory. But we'll never know because I stupidly realized the dream's flaws.