Kayla’s Story

What happened?

I got up in the morning feeling unwell and I knew that a shower would help me so I went straight into the shower and turned the hot water on. Not feeling well straight away, I grabbed the shower hose and sat down on the floor. Before I had the opportunity to turn the cold water tap on, I fell unconscious. It was a couple of minutes after that I regained consciousness in a very unusual way, I was in shock, confusion. I wasn’t in a great deal of pain but I didn’t understand what was happening to me. The feelings were so surreal and something I’ve never felt or experienced before and it was only when I looked at my feet when I realised that they were red, very very red and I knew that I had burnt myself with hot water.

So I turned the hot water tap off straight away and turned the cold tap on and had the cold water running straight over my feet. I called a family friend who is a nurse who told me I was doing the right thing and that I needed to go straight to the after hours GP or the emergency department because it was a Sunday. I chose to go to an after hours GP. A friend was able to drive me there and I was in and out within about 2 hours and advised to go home and put my feet in cold water and prescribed some cream to put on my feet.

My feet were stinging quite badly with the cream on them so I decided to make a booking with my GP the following day and from that I was very lucky that the nurse I saw at my GP had recently done burns training because she was straight on the phone to the Fiona Stanley Burns Unit and 2 days later I was admitted into FSH getting the right treatment. It turns out the burns were a lot deeper than originally thought and I would need skin graft surgery.

My treatment and recovery journey

I feel my recovery plan started before I even went into surgery, with the physiotherapy and the occupational therapists that came to see me everyday. I was up and walking before surgery about 12 hours after surgery. I was on the “penguin waddle walk” for 2 days and that just got the blood flowing in my legs and got me comfortable being on my feet and putting pressure on my feet again. That was quite challenging, I was walking with some assistance, in a Zimmer frame but the small wins, like going to the bathroom by myself was a big achievement in those first couple of hours after surgery and then walking without the Zimmer frame was another achievement. All of those small wins have been really good motivational things to keep me going and to continue on from there. 

My eyes have been opened to how burns can affect you, it’s the mental challenges but also the physical challenges and they are both individual paths that you have to navigate which cross over but don’t go at the same pace either. The physical challenges are quite obvious. I’ve had to learn to walk properly again, I’ve had to keep my foot stretched and push through any pain or discomfort barriers. The dressing changes, which are never comfortable if I’m doing them myself. All of these things are the physical barriers that I’ve got to push through. The mental barriers as well. Knowing how my life was before the burn which was running 20km, I was training for an ultra marathon which was meant to be in July, which has now been postponed but there are many other running events ahead that I’m looking forward to doing.

So, I’m now at the point where I’m going to see my physiotherapist once a week still and I’m doing a lot of different strength and conditioning training for not only my feet keeping the movement going in the foot area so scar tissue doesn’t build up but they again have been able to see what my end goal is which getting my running shoes back on, so they’re conditioning my body to make sure I’m not losing too much muscle.

My life now

It will be a slow journey, my goal is to do a marathon by the end of the year so I’ve got 6 months to work hard and get those running shoes back on and those kilometres behind me. That’s really my end goal. Another big goal of mine is to raise awareness about burns, my burn happened so suddenly and so unexpectedly. Things that could have prevented my burn is having a temperature control valve on my hot water unit which I only found out subsequently to the burn that these things exist, that the water temperature coming to bathrooms shouldn’t only be maximum 50 degrees. The water coming out of my tap was 68 degrees. Anything I can do to raise awareness to individuals but also change legislation to make it mandatory that every single hot water unit cannot push out water hotter than 50 degrees. That’s really important to me.