14-Year-Old Suffers Third-Degree Burns After Removing Nail Polish Near A Candle In US

A 14-year-old girl from Ohio was left covered in third-degree burns after vapour from nail polish remover ignited a dangerous flash fire. Kennedy was removing her nail polish while sitting close to a burning candle, People reported. The incident took place on January 5.

The Ohio teenager is sharing a warning after the simple task of removing nail paint left her hospitalised with serious burn injuries. She told People, "I had to take my fingernail polish off because it's not in uniform and as I was taking it off I had a candle near me on my bed."

She added, "As I was setting the bottle of nail polish remover down on my bed the fumes kind of just mixed and the bottle exploded in my hand. It caught me and everything near me on fire."

"I was really scared and I was screaming and just trying to do as much as I could to stop me being on fire and just get out," she explains, adding that her bed, clothes, arms, hands and hair caught on fire.

Kennedy's parents were at work at the time of the incident and she was home alone with her four siblings. As soon as they heard Kennedy's scream, they burst into her bedroom and were able to put out the fire on her body and siblings made it out of the house to call 911 after closing the door to Kennedy's burning bedroom. 

"It's nothing I've ever been through before. I was still in a lot of shock but after the adrenaline wore down, I was in a lot of pain," she says.  

"It was a horrific scene of her being covered in bubbles and welts and her skin being melted away," adds Kennedy's mother, Brandi, 34, who arrived back home at the same time as the ambulance and fire trucks. "It was a wild experience."

Kennedy was taken to Shriners Children's Hospital in Ohio and she underwent a major procedure to clean her wounds and remove the dead skin. 

On January 17, she underwent a surgical excision and grafting procedure. 

"Kennedy ended up having full-thickness injuries on her abdomen, both thighs and then her right arm. And the other areas she was able to heal without having to have it excised and grafted," Higginson tells PEOPLE. "But she did have pretty extensive injuries to kind of the whole front side of her."

"I've been healing well and no big bumps have occurred," Kennedy says, sharing that her hands have healed enough for her to put her cheerleading bow in her hair by herself. "The whole process of the skin grafts healing takes about a year, a little over. So by next year, maybe in March or April, I should be completely done with the healing process."