Aussie camper shares gruesome injury he sustained after fainting on a hot day

Andrew Lane was hiking along a famous Western Australia track when he fainted from dehydration and woke with a gruesome injury.

A camper has shared the horrific injuries he sustained after becoming dehydrated while trekking through Western Australia.

Andrew Lane was on a long-awaited solo hiking trip across the Bibbulmun Track - a six to eight week trek that stretches from the Perth hills to Albany on the state’s south coast - when a long, hot day of walking left him feeling under the weather.

He told Perth radio station 6PR on Thursday, that when he arrived at his campsite he quickly downed a large bottle of water and began making himself a cup of tea.

However, Andrew lost consciousness in the process and woke to find four of his fingers submerged in the water he’d just boiled.

Aussie hiker Andrew Lane woke with serious burns on his hand after fainting from dehydration on a hot day. Picture: Andrew Lane/6PR

“I was dangling the tea bag in the tea and the bush just turned to black around me and I woke up with my hand in a pretty tepid cup of tea at that stage,” he said.

“I managed to cook my fingers pretty nicely,” he went on, noting that he was out so deeply that the pain of the burn didn’t wake him.

“I’ve seen the photos,” host Simon Beaumont said, “the blistering and the fat that’s coming out of your fingers is extraordinary, it’s very gory.”

“They went up like some big English breakfast sausages,” Andrew agreed.

A hiker on the Bibbulmun Track which stretches 1000km from the Perth hills to Albany.

Incredibly, Andrew did not take himself straight to hospital. Only five days into his hike he was unwilling to call it quits, so he ran his hand under as much cold water as he could get, wrapped it up and went to bed with pain killers.

The following morning he walked another 25kms to a place where he was able to get phone reception and called his wife who urged him to get to a hospital.

He was treated at Collie Hospital where they “cut off all the blisters and gave it a good scrub”, which by Andrew’s report, hurt a lot more than the initial burn.

Andrew has now recovered, after having several skin grafts, and warned holiday-makers to be aware of dehydration and the dangers of hot things like boiling water and fires while camping.