Emergencies "in a pinch"

While taking the First Aid part of my CERT, one of the ladies shared a story of an emergency that happened in her family. I asked her to email her story to me to share it here so you could be thinking about what you could use "in a pinch" in an emergency. Thank you Karna!





Emergencies don't always happen at convenient times or when you have the essential materials handy. Sometimes you have to make due with the materials you can gather around you. For example, if you don't have sterile 4x4 gauze pads, in a pinch a t-shirt will do or a pillow case can be used as a sling. The key is that sterility is preferable. Some common sterile household items that could be used as a dressing when nothing else is available are women's feminine napkins, tampons, sealed packages of diapers, or even incontinence pads. As long as these products are still in their sealed packages then they are sterile and can be used as an alternative sterile dressing. A word of caution: please note that if you decide to use these items to pay particular attention to any treatment they may have received. For example, my younger brother who is extremely prone to horrible nose bleeds had one such episode one afternoon while we were out with our mother. We didn't have anything readily available to put on his face to catch or stop the bleeding. What we came up with was to cut a tampon in half and put each half up each of his nostrils. Voila! Crisis averted, or so we thought. About 10 minutes after the initial insertion he began to become agitated. He began waving his hands in front of his face and told us that the inside of his nose was burning. After taking a better look at the tampon we used to stop the bleeding we found that it was a scented tampon. As the tampon began soaking up the blood the chemical perfume wicked its way up his nose and into his sinus cavity causing him pain. If we had paid better attention to what we were using as an "in a pinch" dressing we wouldn't have caused him any pain other than the embarrassment of being 17 and having a tampon shoved up your nose by your big sister. Love ya Matt!

Karna