2017 Volume 79 Issue 1 Pages 34-37
A 12-year-old boy riding a bicycle collided with a parked car during daylight hours in July and was found to have fallen on his face. He was diagnosed as having brain injury with a fracture of the frontal bone by a medical practitioner and also had ulcers and blisters on the both thighs. He was transferred to our hospital. He had hexagonal grille-shaped ulcers and blisters on the extensor surfaces of both thighs. The hexagonal grille-pattern of the ulcers and blisters matched the design of the manhole cover on which he had fallen. These findings suggested that he suffered from contact burns caused by the hot manhole cover. The burns included both superficial and deep dermal burns covering 4％ of his body surface area, with a burn index of 2. The wounds healed in one and a half months with conservative therapy, but a hypertrophic scar remained. The possible reasons why the wounds were deep are as follows. First, the patient had contact with a hot manhole cover on a summer day. Second, the contact continued presumably for one to two hours due to the disturbance of consciousness after his collision with a parked car. Third, his thighs directly contacted the manhole cover because he wore short pants.
