I always tell my clients that I try my absolute BEST to prepare myself for any emergencies that may pop up! I take vitamins regularly to keep myself from getting sick (lord knows I have a seriously weak immune system!), I make sure to schedule routine oil changes for my car and always have my tires checked and of course, bring back-up equipment if I need it. But the ONE thing I wasn’t prepared for was burning my shooting hand the day of an engagement session! And it was totally my fault… :\

Let me back up a bit. This past Sunday I woke up excited for what the day had in store. I was going to be heading down to the beach to capture one of my lovely 2016 couples, Nicole & Joe in their engagement session. It was a BEAUTIFUL day and couldn’t have been more perfect for a session! Not only that but it was later in the day so Jose and I could go out and do some shopping before I had to head out to their session. But of course, I had to do my hair 🙂 I started to straighten it but then thought I might keep it curled so I quickly changed my straightening iron to my curling iron and left it on the sink to warm up. While it warmed up, I became distracted checking Instagram and playing games on my phone and TOTALLY forgot about the switch I made! So when I went to start fixing with my hair I reached for what I thought was the top of my straightener when in fact, my hand had made DIRECT contact and literally GRIPPED the plates of my hot curling iron. I can’t even begin to explain what I felt. It was INSTANT heat and instant pain. It felt like it my hand was stuck on those plates and took me forever to drop the iron out of my hand. And when I finally did, I lost it. I burst into tears, ran into our bedroom and poor Jose had to try and figure out through my tears what just happened. I could barely talk, the pain was so constant and SO strong! I had burned myself on my neck or ear before but had never had anything even close to this happened.

It was totally my fault and the worst spaz moment I’ve ever had. But the worst part of it was it could not have happened at a worse time. My first thought was “how am I going to shoot??” While we wrapped my hand in a cool towel and DOUSED it with Aloe-Vera, we discovered I had suffered second-degree burns on my hand. It was AWFUL. The majority was on my palm, my thumb and my middle finger. So luckily I could easily shoot my pointer finger, the finger that I use to shoot and move my dials with. But it was going to be super hard to actually GRIP my camera with those burns. Luckily, I had EVERYTHING we could have possibly needed for a moment like this. Aloe-Vera, hydro-cortisone, ibuprofen and plenty of tape and gauze to wrap up my hand! I ran through every worse case scenario in the book… “how am I going to hold ym camera?? will I be able to drive??” And two hours later I  decided I was just going to suck it up, wrap up my hand and shoot Nicole & Joe’s engagement session!

I didn’t even tell them ahead of time because I didn’t want to concern them in anyway. By an hour before I had to leave, I knew I could do it and wouldn’t need to postpone the shoot or anything. It was a little tricky at times to shoot or grab my lens’ out of my bag but besides that… I consider myself SO lucky! The outcome of this could have been 10X worse and I’m just so happy it wasn’t as bad as it could have been! Nicole & Joe were SHOCKED when they saw my hand but once I assured them I was fine, we killed it at their session! I can not wait to share their session with you all soon and now you know… I shot it with my hand completely wrapped up and burnt underneath!

So why exactly am I sharing this? What’s the purpose of this post? Well, besides filling you in on what’s been going on in my life behind the scenes lol I guess to let you know that sometimes things DO happen that you are not prepared for. And they WILL happen the morning of an engagement shoot or even a wedding! But we dealt with it, we fix things as fast as we could, we didn’t panic and handled it slowly and in the end, everything was okay 🙂 This isn’t the first time something has happened like this and it won’t be the last but I just want to assure you that as long as I can, I will ALWAYS put my emergencies aside and put my clients first!

As for my hand? It’s okay! You can barely notice anything happened, which makes me look SO crazy! Just some big, fat blisters and rough skin that needs some healing but I’ll live… and next time, be a LOT more careful when using my curling iron!