A Norfolk woman has been left battling life-long scarring after a hot water bottle - that she didn't realise was eight years out of date - suddenly exploded.
Diss-born Laura Beeslee had been suffering with severe menstrual cramps earlier in August, and reached out for a go-to remedy - her trustee hot water bottle - in the hope that setting it against her stomach would alleviate her agony.
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The 31-year-old woman filled the hot water bottle up with the freshly boiled liquid, opting to tuck it underneath the waistband of her jeans, believing it would treat the period pain quicker.
Just ten minutes later, however, Laura - who is a nursery manager - started to feel a strange sensation down her legs.
She looked down to see that the bag was starting to split, before it exploded entirely, releasing the boiling hot liquid all down her body.
"I was standing up just tidying the work surfaces and it just burst all of a sudden," she later told press. "I've used it before and slept with it and had no issues in the past.
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"There was almost like a numbing sensation but I knew something was wrong.
"I looked down and could see water had gone down my legs and was all over the floor."
Laura then raced to the bathroom while screaming in agony, quickly attempting to remove her jeans while her partner Adam Rayner, 37, hosed her down with cold water.
"My partner got me in the bath and hosed me down for half an hour," she recalls. "I was going in and out of consciousness because the pain was so excruciating.
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"I felt like I was going to die. It was a pain like I'd never experienced in my life."
Adam then drove his girlfriend to their local hospital where she was then blue-lighted to the burns unit at Bloomfield Hospital in Chelmsford, Essex, due to the severity of her injuries.
She was rapidly placed under general anaesthetic as medics popped the colossal blisters that adored her more severely affected areas.
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Laura then spent the next three days in the hospital's intensive care unit.
Stomach-wrenching photos taken on the day shows red-raw burns on Laura's legs and stomach which subsequently required skin grafts to rebuild her damaged skin.
"They took quite a large amount of my skin from my left thigh and put it on my inner thighs and stomach," she said. "I wasn't able to walk for a few days - I had to use a zimmer frame."
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Four months on since her catastrophic accident, Laura admits she's only now being able to work relatively comfortably.
"They said it could take at least two years for my inner thighs to recover but there's likely to be scarring for the rest of my life," she explained.
"If we go out for the day, I have to sit down after walking for a little while. I have to moisturise my inner thighs up to six times a day otherwise they become quite tight and I can't move very well.
"It's still swollen now and I still can't wear jeans."
The accidentally encouraged Laura to investigate the safety of these hot water bottles, later making the shocking discovery that her own device was out of date by a staggering eight years.
She also discovered that a flower symbol at the top of each bottle indicates the date each bottle was manufactured.
"I didn't even know hot water bottles had an expiry date on them," she later confessed. "I think we'd worked out it was about eight years out of date when I used it.
"It's quite scary because a lot of people have had the same hot water bottle since they were children.
"Please just check the expiry date, don't use boiling water, use water from the tap, only fill it halfway and be really vigilant."
Topics: Health
Rhianna Benson