Posted on 06/04/2002 11:14:18 AM PDT by geaux
A Tri-State woman looking for a quick and easy tan received an eye-opening burn instead.
Larri Brown of Williamstown, Ky., got into her home tanning bed last week and set the timer.
Then she fell asleep.
The timer was supposed to shut off the ultraviolet lights after 20 minutes, but the timer stuck.
Three hours after she first climbed into the bed, Brown's husband, Steve Brown, found his sleeping wife and pulled her out of the bed.
"We went to the hospital, but because it was a tanning bed burn, they couldn't do anything because the burn comes from the inside out, like a microwave does," Larri Brown said. "So that's scary, because I didn't know how much my organs had baked and if I would survive."
As Larri Brown nurses her burns, the couple wondered why the bed didn't have a backup timer or emergency switch.
"It should have kicked off," she said. "You know, that's a lot of heat going into your body."
The Browns said that the company that made the bed, ESB Enterprises, is sending them a replacement bed and covering their medical costs.
New tanning beds made by the company come with backup timers installed, but beds made before 2000 do not have backup timers.
Steve Brown recommends spending the $20 to $100 for a backup timer on beds that don't have one already.
A backup timer would have eliminated his wife's disastrous turn in their tanning bed, he said.
"At least I woke up before she had been in there another two hours," Steve Brown said. "She would have been dead."
Larri Brown is expected to recover from her burn, but experts recommend avoiding tanning beds altogether. The number of skin cancer cases has been rising over the years and experts cite the sun, tanning beds and sun lamps as the reason.
More than one million new skin cancer cases are diagnosed each year. Researchers believe that individuals who use tanning beds or tanning lamps are more than twice as likely to develop a common form of skin cancer called squamous cell carcinoma. In addition, use of a tanning bed nearly doubles the risk of another common skin cancer called basal cell carcinoma, WLWT reported.
Studies show that an estimated 28 million people in the United States using tanning beds each year, and roughly half of all high school girls visit tanning booths at least four times a year, WLWT reported.
WLWT Eyewitness News 5 and ChannelCincinnati.com will continue to update this story as additional information becomes available.
Actually, microwave ovens heat by inducing electrical currents in conducting mediums, such as water. But the microwave energy will not penetrate particularly deeply into the conducting medium. Hence most wet foods will cook from the surface in microwave ovens. Only very low density or dry items will allow the microwaves to penetrate to deeper wetter layers.
Interestingly, ice is not a good conductor of electricity, so it is hard to dethaw stuff in the microwave. The ice is pretty transparent to the microwaves and doesn't heat up directly.
You sold me a faulty one and you want me to get into another one? Nope, get that crap away from me!
I’m not sure that’s the case… I thought tanning beds used ultraviolet light or something and couldn’t penetrate deep enough to cook any organs. But what do I know anyway…
Liberal: ESB Enterprises is responsible for "Larri" falling asleep in the tanning bed and she should hire a trial attorney and sue for damages.
Conservative: "Larri" is a moron, and responsible for her own actions.
Or the one where Kramer uses butter to tan and Newman starts seeing him as food (i.e. a turkey). They simulate Kramer's head on a real turkey and he waves at Newman with his wing. LOL.
I'm sorry. When I was younger and before I had kids (therefore having money), I visited the tanning booth on a regular basis.
Unless she's got a different kind, you're laying on a flat sheet of plexiglass. How on earth can you sleep that deeply?
For three hours?
The funniest part of that episode was when he met the Black folks and they thought he was Black too (like Clintoon).
AB
Lawsuit soon to follow, claiming the tanning bed company is at fault.
The sad thing is, she'll win.
I don't know, either, but I was talking about this story with a co-worker, and she swore that she went to college with a girl who died this way. She wanted to get really tan before formal, and went to five different tanning places in the same day. She freaking baked herself! That's so gross!
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