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Apr. 27th, 2012 08:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerOh. So the evening is going to be like that, is it?
I cancelled dinner plans with friends because, among other things, the blisters from the huge mass of poison ivy soreness on my chest have been seeping fluid all day. Something I only discovered in the afternoon when I discovered that I had dark stains all over the right chest of my dress shirt.
So I stopped at the chemist on the way home, thinking I should cover the area with something absorbent, at least when I was in company, until it heals, so as not to be entirely gross. I got some large, thick dressings, some tape, some gauze, and some witch hazel (as I'd seen indications it was a decent anti-inflammatory and nowhere in the store could I find the anti-microbial wash that is stationed in little dispensers all over my building and apparently a sovereign remedy for this crap as it both disinfects any skin breakage and dries the skin so as to work against more seeping.)
Of course traffic was incredibly slow, so it took me nearly two hours to get home. And of course the tape had been on sale because it's entirely useless. Of course, the witch hazel bottle had one of those safety caps inside the cap, so you have to take the lid off, figure out how to pry the skintight lid off the mouth of the bottle, spill some of the contents, put the cap back on, and then find that even the gentlest pressure sprays liquid not down onto the gauze pad you are holding but at a gravity-defying angle parallel to the floor halfway across the bathroom. Of course, when you open the second packet of gauze (because they have to take up half the space in the box with individual wrappings), the gauze flies out and onto the rather dirty floor. Of course the tape doesn't stick to (a) skin, (b) the gauze or heavy dressing, (c) itself, despite being marketed as sticky tape. Of course, it's impossible to effectively wrap a piece of gauze around your own arm, or, having done that, to tape it in place.
Naturally, when you try another package of tape, the tape in that package is afflicted with static electricity and defies your experience of the first roll by sticking to *itself* consistently while you are trying to tear strips off and stick them nearby for concerted use. Naturally cats push open the door to the bathroom, causing you to bump something which prompts a cascade of objects off the wall shelf that were quite happily sitting there a moment ago.
The one thing that remains mysterious to me about this process is where the 5-6 cubic feet of billowing lard came from that suddenly materializes inside my torso when I try to put a compression bandage on the side of my chest. I don't really understand that part at all.
I've had at least cursory emergency training for broken limbs and gunshot/shrapnel wounds. If you are somewhere in an unpleasant part of the world where the air is filled with flying lead (Uruzgan, say, or East Baltimore) and you get a through-and-through on a limb or other non-chest cavity area, and I have a USG emergency medkit to hand, I think I can probably make sure you don't bleed out before the chopper or the back-up humvee gets there. But based on this evening's experience, for god's sake do not ask me to help bandage a minor home injury with $30 of medical supplies from the average drug store. Because I will fail miserably.
I cancelled dinner plans with friends because, among other things, the blisters from the huge mass of poison ivy soreness on my chest have been seeping fluid all day. Something I only discovered in the afternoon when I discovered that I had dark stains all over the right chest of my dress shirt.
So I stopped at the chemist on the way home, thinking I should cover the area with something absorbent, at least when I was in company, until it heals, so as not to be entirely gross. I got some large, thick dressings, some tape, some gauze, and some witch hazel (as I'd seen indications it was a decent anti-inflammatory and nowhere in the store could I find the anti-microbial wash that is stationed in little dispensers all over my building and apparently a sovereign remedy for this crap as it both disinfects any skin breakage and dries the skin so as to work against more seeping.)
Of course traffic was incredibly slow, so it took me nearly two hours to get home. And of course the tape had been on sale because it's entirely useless. Of course, the witch hazel bottle had one of those safety caps inside the cap, so you have to take the lid off, figure out how to pry the skintight lid off the mouth of the bottle, spill some of the contents, put the cap back on, and then find that even the gentlest pressure sprays liquid not down onto the gauze pad you are holding but at a gravity-defying angle parallel to the floor halfway across the bathroom. Of course, when you open the second packet of gauze (because they have to take up half the space in the box with individual wrappings), the gauze flies out and onto the rather dirty floor. Of course the tape doesn't stick to (a) skin, (b) the gauze or heavy dressing, (c) itself, despite being marketed as sticky tape. Of course, it's impossible to effectively wrap a piece of gauze around your own arm, or, having done that, to tape it in place.
Naturally, when you try another package of tape, the tape in that package is afflicted with static electricity and defies your experience of the first roll by sticking to *itself* consistently while you are trying to tear strips off and stick them nearby for concerted use. Naturally cats push open the door to the bathroom, causing you to bump something which prompts a cascade of objects off the wall shelf that were quite happily sitting there a moment ago.
The one thing that remains mysterious to me about this process is where the 5-6 cubic feet of billowing lard came from that suddenly materializes inside my torso when I try to put a compression bandage on the side of my chest. I don't really understand that part at all.
I've had at least cursory emergency training for broken limbs and gunshot/shrapnel wounds. If you are somewhere in an unpleasant part of the world where the air is filled with flying lead (Uruzgan, say, or East Baltimore) and you get a through-and-through on a limb or other non-chest cavity area, and I have a USG emergency medkit to hand, I think I can probably make sure you don't bleed out before the chopper or the back-up humvee gets there. But based on this evening's experience, for god's sake do not ask me to help bandage a minor home injury with $30 of medical supplies from the average drug store. Because I will fail miserably.
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Date: 2012-04-28 01:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-28 05:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-28 08:17 pm (UTC)