“Get it out of your house,” said Josh’s mother, Wanda Atkins.
“If it can be prevented from happening to another kid, that’s the best we can make out of this situation,” said his father, Springfield dentist David Atkins.
The day after the boy was burned, Associated Press reported that nine companies were recalling 2 million bottles of the gel fuel, which the Consumer Products Safety Commission said is “linked to several dozen cases in which people were burned when they couldn’t tell whether the flame was out.”
The fuel is used in ornament fire pots sold for indoor and outdoor use.
A kindergartner at Reid Elementary School, Josh was rushed to Springfield Regional Medical Center, then to Dayton Children’s Medical Center on Wednesday after the accident.
“His clothes were not burned and his hair was not singed,” his mother said. But Josh’s blond eyebrows were burned off, his face blistered and his lips left temporarily with dark patches of skin.
Mrs. Atkins said they were toasting marshmallows at the kitchen table when the flame from the fire pot flared nearly a foot into the air. Because it was the first thing at hand, she threw cereal on the flame to try to douse it.
When it flared again, she threw flour on it, she said. It rekindled again, she said, “and about that time, he screamed.”
Mrs. Atkins said the flame had followed a trickle of gel on the table toward her son. Whether the liquid had splashed on him as she tried to put out the fire, neither she nor her son could say.
“When he yelled, I could see his profile, and there were blue flames on his face,” she said.
Mrs. Atkins dropped her son to the ground and put out the flame. The boy’s father was minutes away in his car and whisked his son to the hospital. At Children’s, he was given morphine for the pain from the burns.
More pain was caused when the burned skin was removed.
“They had to get all that off so they could get the medicine in so it could penetrate,” said his mother, who is a nurse.
Unable to open his eyes for two days because of crusted skin, Josh can now see, and his parents said any minor vision issues are likely to be temporary.
Home since Sunday, Josh is being treated with antibiotic creams to fight infection and moisten his skin to minimize scarring. Through sore lips he is drinking the nutritional supplements he calls his “granny milkshakes.”
He will return to Children’s for care and should return to school soon.
Mrs. Atkins said they had cooked marshmallows over the fire pot previously without incident and had gotten one because her brother was so pleased with the one she’d bought him for Christmas.
“I bought it in June. They were everywhere,” she said.
The Atkinses said they feel fortunate their son’s burns were not worse and that the fire did not burn his twin sister, Rachel, or spread through the house.
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