Last week I had a small fire in my home.

Usually, I profess to be a pretty good cook who's pretty comfortable in the kitchen.
I'm not one for recipes, I like to wing it. But I was watching an episode of Rachel Ray where she made this Apple Cider Chicken Recipe for Morgan Freeman. He was raving about it. So I gave it a try.

While cooking in the kitchen, a bottle of cooking oil gets knocked over. The oil pours into my pan and down the sides into the burner of my stove. I grab it, turn off the burner and cover the pan.

Well, there was a small problem. I turned off the wrong burner. So, I had oil boiling now under the lid. So the lid starts rocking and clanging. I pick it up and a wall of fire shot up into the air.

I saw my microwave/hood, my cabinet, and wall covered in a wall of flames. Then I look down, my shirt is on fire too. I stop, drop, roll, just like we all are taught. But I wasn't sure if I should do it on the ceramic tile floor of my kitchen which had some spilled oil on it, or the carpeted living room.

I ended up grabbing the sprayer from my kitchen sink, and spraying my clothes down. The wall of flames over my stove only lasted a few seconds before quickly dying out. But my home was covered in smoke, and the smoke alarms were going off.

Then my hand starts killing me, I put it under water to watch my skin wrinkle up like a raisin. It just starts sliding and moving right off my body. I'm flipping out, I'm watching my skin slide off.

Well, I go to the ER, turns out I have second and third degree burns on my hand and first degree on my face where the flames hit.

The bandaged right arm you see on air is because all the skin is burned off the top of my hand. It still has to regrow, it could take months. The beard is because my left side of my face is still sore and sensitive from the burns it received. No shaving for a while. (Although, there's a debate raging in the newsroom over whether it should stay. Many people like the new look.)

I'm still fighting pain, and am taking it a little slowly on the reporting trail right now, but trying to get back in the swing of things. Hope you don't mind the scruffy, bandaged reporter for the next little while.