Mom suffers second degree burns after pressure cooker explodes

Australia: Mother of three, Cassie Hodges suffered a severe burns across her arms, chest and stomach two minutes after she put her newborn baby down to serve diner, when a pressure cooker with boiling soup spilled on her.
Hodges was quickly rushed to the burnt unit of Concord Hospital in NSW for treatment where she remained for days with burns on 12 percent of her body with unbearable pain and life-changing injuries.
Her husband Mark has been helping her with everyday tasks such as eating, drinking, washing and the rest.

“Mark has to feed me like a baby, hold me while I cry through the pain, and do everything else I need” she said.
“I will be OK, but I want to share my story. Two minutes earlier I was holding my son; my poor son could have been hurt. We are lucky; I want to make sure this never happens to anyone ever again.”

On Friday, with the family hungry, Mark decided to cook some soup for diner and not enough time to slow cook, he decided to cook with a pressure cooker. He set the cooker to the ‘soup’ option and walked away.
25 minutes later, Cassie walked into the kitchen with her 13-week-old boy Zac in her arms and then called out to Mark to let him know that the soup was ready.
Cassie then walked out to the lounge room to sit her son and told her two older daughters Olivia, five, and Ruby, two, to sit at the table before serving up dinner.

“I walked back into the kitchen and Mark let the pressure release valve off to release the pressure. The steam came out of the top as normal. Then I heard a click, suddenly I knew the lid unlocked and the next minute I was hit with something,” she said.

To their shock, the lid of the cooker had unlocked and because it hadn’t finished releasing the pressure, the lid “flew off” and the soup exploded all over Cassie and Mark.

“The entire contents hit me like as if someone chucked a bucket of water at me, the noise of it was a loud sizzle,” she said.
“I immediately screamed. My partner was holding his stomach and he pulled his arm back and his skin was all peeled off. I removed my singlet and ran to the shower.”
This all unfolded with their three children nearby.
“My five-year-old daughter came in after hearing me scream, she panicked, started to freak out, screaming,” she said.
“She will require counseling, she is not OK.”

The couple called an ambulance.

“I have severe burns to majority of both my arms, my chest and stomach,” she said.
“I was lucky, if I hadn’t gotten straight into the shower I would have needed skin grafts and doctors said if I had breathed any of it in I would have been put into a coma to save my life.
“I was told I had to have all my dead burnt skin removed by scraping with a rough towel and biobrane, a type of pig skin, applied immediately.”

Cassie gritted and cried through excruciating pain, as staff scraped her dead skin from her raw and blistering body with just endone and Panadol.

“I have never felt such pain in my life,” she said.
“Mark has a deep burn to his stomach because he didn’t get into the water as he wanted me to be OK. His is much smaller, but still deep and very painful.
“We are both heavily medicated,” she said.

Cassie was unable to see her two daughters for over a week as they stayed with family members.

“She came home and she started to scream and cry when she saw me, she is very withdrawn,” Cassie said.

“She keeps asking questions over and over, says ‘I love you’ constantly.”
She is positive the couple will make a full recovery, and understands it could have been much worse.
“It terrifies me, I’ve cried many times thinking about my son, thinking it could have been him,” she said.

Cassie wants to send a warning to other families and called for the Casera pressure cooker she got as a Christmas gift in 2014 to be recalled.

“I want people to be aware of the dangers, we did nothing wrong, the machine unlocked prematurely, it should stay locked and unable to be opened until the pressure is all gone,” she said.
“Throw your cookers out, or demand a refund.”