My hands feel like burning

It sounds like something Ralph Wiggum would say.

But that was how I felt last night. For a completely explicable reason, I had an intense burning sensation in my hands. In fact, it had been there all day.

My hands felt really warm, but my hands weren’t actually any hotter than the rest of my body. The culprit in this situation was improper hot pepper management.

I had spent the entire morning making an organic, anti-ant remedy for my new vegetable patch. As I’m getting ready to transplant the seedlings into the garden, I want to rid the soil of bugs that might feed on my new young plants. The solution includes garlic, hot peppers, and soapy water. You’re probably thinking that this mixture would have a wretched, biting scent.

That’s the point.

So I went about preparing the solution by crushing garlic and hot peppers on a rock with smaller rock. Everythingw as going great. The scent was bien fuerte (really strong). I was not going to have any issues with pests in my new garden.



As I’m mashing up the vegetables one of the soldiers who helps manage the nursery walked by and told me that I should put some gloves on when working with peppers. I didn’t really understand why. I thought that it was so my hands wouldn’t reek of hot peppers all day. So I took his advice and put on some rubber gloves.

Then I went about the task of finishing my solution and letting it ferment over the weekend. Then I walked back to the municipality office (which is a just a few blocks from the nursery) to get ready for lunch.

As I’m sitting in the office, chatting with my coworkers, my hands start to feel like they are on fire. Then I realized why the soldier had told me to put the gloves on. With prolonged exposure to the hot peppers, the same chemicals that make them spicy also emit a burning sensation to your skin — especially when you have open cut on your hand.

I’m not big on spicy foods to begin and normally stay away from the when possible. But I do know that you’re typically not supposed to use water to ease intensely spicy foods. I just didn’t know what the proper strategy was to take with aji peppers.

I walked across the street to the internet café and did a little research. Milk products are the solution. So I got a yogurt and eased the burning on my lips and around my mouth. I also applied some to my hands, but obviously not enough.

Pretty soon, my lips stopped burning. But my hands didn’t.

The pain wasn’t unbearbable, and for large parts of the day, it wasn’t even noticeable. But after a took a cold shower last night, the water seemed to aggravate whatever remnants of hot pepper were in my hand —and the burning became more intense.

It went in cycles of heating up and cooling down throughout the night (I’ve never used IcyHot before, but I imagine that this is what it feels like). I told one of my fellow volunteers about my burning sensation in my hands and how my lips were burning earlier in the day. He sent me a text message that advised wearing gloves when I go to the bathroom. I told him that might be the best advice I’ve ever received.

When I woke up this morning, my hands were almost back to normal.

Lesson learned.