Last week I went to Santropol Roulant to help out with a canning workshop. We made litres and litres of canned salsa and I stupidly volunteered to chop the 6 lbs of hot chili peppers…by hand. I even food processed the really hot ones, thinking it wouldn’t be so bad to just do the slightly less (but still scorching) ones by hand, so as to keep them in larger pieces instead of tiny, food processed pieces.
I left the kitchen at the end of the evening feeling fine, and my hands moved in the cool air as I walked to the metro. I had to go six stops, from St-Laurent to Charlevoix, but by the third my fingers started to burn. I thought about getting off of the metro and out into the cold air, but I thought I could make it. No one on the metro noticed me sweating and frantically checking my hands for stigmata-style burning, which is what it felt like.
By the fifth stop I thought I was going to pass out. My heart was beating too fast, like you get with a panic attack. Could I make it? Just one more stop. I could get out here, though, and run to find a bathroom where I could run my hands under the tap. But then I’d have to walk the rest of the way home, and what if they started to burn too much in that time? Better to just stick it out one more stop. Just one more…
I ran from the bottom of the Charlevoix metro to the entrance, 200 steps up (approximately). The running helped as the air movement cooled my hands. I finally got home and got my hands in ice water for temporary relief. But my night was just beginning.
I then googled “chilies hands burning remedies.” These are the things that didn’t work:
1. Lemon juice
2. Shampoo (I washed my hands in it)
3. Baking soda
4. Lemon juice and baking soda (it froths)
5. Shampoo again (I took a shower 10 minutes later. But the hot water burned, so I repeatedly went from cold water for cooling my hands to hot for rubbing my hair, switching back to cold before I passed out from the burning. Heads retain far too much heat.
6. Yogurt for 10 minutes (yup, I stuck my hands in a bowl of yogurt that lactose intolerant me happened to have on hand from my dad’s visit a week before)
7. Sleeping with my hands in a bowl of ice water.
8. Sleeping with one ice pack. Malleable ice gloves may have worked, or four ice packs wrapped around all sides and contours of my hands, but I didn’t have either of those. Remind me to invent those gloves for all future chili pepper sufferers…
Then, dear internet, you told me to try rubbing alcohol. But I was skeptical of you by this point, so I only stuck one yogurt-ed hand in a bowl of rubbing alcohol and gave it five minutes. That hand got worse. So it was back to the yogurt.
But you know what else doesn’t work? Sleeping (on a towel) with your hands in a bowl of yogurt…
I’d already popped one extra-strength ibuprofen I had from recently getting my wisdom teeth removed. The pain was unbearable, so at 2am, unable to sleep, I popped two more, turned on “The Angel’s Share“, which just reminded me of the rubbing alcohol, and stuck my hands back in the yogurt to wait it out. At 4am I emailed my boss, explaining the situation and saying I needed the day off.
What I learned from this unfortunate situation:
1. Wear gloves when chopping more than five chili peppers. Five is arbitrary, but seems practical.
2. While in the past I’ve been judgmental of people who don’t like spicy things, perhaps I should stop calling them wimps.
And most importantly:
3. It’s awfully hard (and messy) to sleep with your hands in a bowl of yogurt…
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